Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Haywire 2011

  ★★★ Watched 19 Mar 2025

  I honestly put this into the camp of Soderbergh films like The Girlfriend Experience where he has a clear vision and entrusts it to a lead that comes up JUST short of what's needed. The hand to hand stuff rules, the cast is insane, it just needed a better lead performance and a better score to pull it together.

  The tone of this film feels super avantgarde only because it has some tonal mismatches. The score feels closer to an…

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  Trans-Europ-Express 1966

  ★★★★★ Watched 16 Mar 2025

  Alain Robbe-Grillet's bondage metatextual films and me: (This sort of thing is my bag, baby)

  I initially thought the finale was a response to Le Samouraï but that wouldn't be out until the following year.

Popular reviews

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  Saltburn 2023

  ★★ Watched 22 Dec 2023

  Competently made with some visual splendor, but all around a bit of a tonal mess. There isn't a real sense that it's building or leading to anything. Sure, you have the natural end point of the last day of summer, but unless you show markers for time passing then it's a fairly pointless framing.
  I also found the ending to feel like a studio note, it was all so obvious it didn't need to be shown.
  A pretty boring film…

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  Barbie 2023

  ½ Watched 15 Dec 2023

  It's fitting that Barbie can't stop thinking about death, because during this films exhaustive run time I also couldn't stop thinking about wanting to die. The product is disgusting. Everything that went into it screams of corporate synergy and the necessity of farcical self awareness. Barbie as a product has a long history of using humanities differences as capital to sell people stereotyped iconography under the guise of inclusivity. Should I have expected more from a product? no. But it's…

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