Favorite films

Recent reviews

• 

  Mickey 17 2025

  ★★★½ Watched 06 Mar 2025

  initially was blown away by it but have cooled on it the more i sit with it. all of the individual parts from the production design to most of the performances to even most of the scenes are really strong on their own but as a whole the production just isn’t that cohesive. There are just way too many characters with incomplete arcs where their starting point is compelling and their endpoint makes sense based on the trajectory but there’s…

• 

  Aftersun 2022

  ★★★★ Watched 28 Feb 2025

  man it was a bad idea to watch this on my 32nd birthday. can’t remember the last time a movie hurt me this much.

Popular reviews

• 

  RRR 2022

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 28 Oct 2022

  Great movies leave the audience cheering at the finale, this one had the entire theater going ballistic at the climax of *every* action scene. I'm going to be pushing my DSA chapter to rent a theater for a screening of it some time.

• 

  Whiplash 2014

  ★★★★½ Watched 24 May 2015

  There are many ways to attain engagement in cinema but by far the most storied and lauded is tension. Hitchcock did it, Kubrick did it, Tarantino does it. This movie distills that to its utter essence. Character arcs are spare and predictable, lighting and color cues are straight forward and intuitive and even the scenes have a tendency to repeat themselves in structure and pacing.

  All that's left is the execution of creating that tension for the audience. And this movie gets it like none other. JK Simmons is a revelation bringing back the crassness of his utterly perfect turn as JJ in Spiderman.