Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  Cruel Images 2024

  Watched 26 Nov 2024 1

  This is my sophomore short film.

  I wanted to detail a piece of now-forgotten German cinema, Uncle Krüger, a sweeping epic about the Boer War that depicts in its finale a British concentration camp, shot while an actual Nazi concentration camp operated only 30-some kilometers from the set.

  I tried to examine the depths of its cynicism and how that cynicism has echoed after the fall of the Third Reich, as present-day fascist regimes too see not only victimhood in the crimes of the past, but also an example of what to inflict on others.

  The film can be found here: vimeo.com/1033352755

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  Shiloh 2022

  Watched 02 Apr 2022

  I can't rate this objectively, as I directed it. This is my first short film.

  I was inspired by Marxist filmmaker Masao Adachi's landscape theory and its examination of how landscapes express the dominant political power, and I sought to apply it to the power of romantic memory, melancholy, and nostalgia. I wanted to craft a piece of slow cinema about a universal experience and I hope I succeeded.

  The film can be found here: vimeo.com/684727715

Recent reviews

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  Leila and the Wolves 1984

  ★½ Watched 16 Mar 2025

  Heiny Srour gave a short speech before the screening I was at in which she squarely focused on the crime of Jolani not shaking hands with the German foreign minister three months ago as evidence of the evils of religion. Felt like a bad omen for a movie I was initially very excited for.

  Leila and the Wolves is consistently well-shot, and there are theoretically lots of good ingredients here with the premise of recognizing the forgotten role of Arab…

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  The Congress 1989

  ★ Watched 15 Mar 2025

  There is nothing that has aged worse than this faux-complex, over-simplified hagiography about the wonders of compromise, the unique beauty of the Congress as a symbol of democracy, how Congress will never fail because its institutions are so strong, and about how unfair it is that we common idiots have the gall to hate it, hypocrites we are. Give me a fucking break. A continuously infuriating, myopic piece of shit.

Popular reviews

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  The Substance 2024

  ★½ Watched 22 Sep 2024 20

  Have never had my high expectations dashed like this before with a movie. Literally from the first minute I felt an immediate sense of dread as I realized what this was and that the marketing had portrayed a much more patient, competently directed film than actually existed.

  There are downright show-stopping, highly committed performances here from Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid, but it is in service of a half-baked vision, offering surface-level feminist critiques, and ultimately containing the…

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  Enter the Void 2009

  ★½ Watched 08 Mar 2019 2

  more like enter my ass