Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  The Puppet Masters 1994

  ★★★ Watched 16 Mar 2025

  I wanted to like this, a take on an alien body snatcher movie based on a Robert A. Heinlein novel, more than I did; it has a good cast, some gooey special effects, and, most importantly, a feeling of sincere wonder towards its silly sci-fi story that I found to be infectious. But after an energetic first act, this lost me; it's too grey and televisual to really be impressive, and its two leads are also by far the most boring members of its cast.

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  Él 1953

  ★★★★½ Watched 15 Mar 2025

  One of the gems of Buñuel’s Mexican period, and one of the great films about the follies of masculinity. As is often the case in the films Buñuel made during in Mexico, this starts out feeling like a typical piece of popular cinema and then begins to splinter; as the romance at its center starts to turn toxic, the eerie details begin to pile up (the staircase, the purgatorial garden; really clever details in the sound design, like the silence…

Popular reviews

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  When the Cat Comes 1963

  ★★★★ Watched 03 Nov 2018 2

  Released early in the development of the Czechoslovak New Wave, it’s fun and fitting to think of The Cassandra Cat as a metaphor for the cinema movement and its place in the strict communist regime of Czechoslovakia. The titular cat removes his glasses and shows the people of the town their true colors. This, too, is what the Czech New Wave filmmakers set out to dd, often to the dismay of their country’s censors who, like many of the townspeople…

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  Fahrenhype 9/11 2004

  ½ Watched 28 Nov 2017 5

  This semester, I took a class on post-9/11 media. Collectively, we felt that it would be interesting to watch a conservative documentary to see what kind of tactics were used in comparison to the liberal documentaries we had already watched over the semester. I guess this was the only one available in the library, so there you go. Conveniently, it positions itself as a response to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, one of the first films we watched this semester. I…