Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Funeral Parade of Roses 1969

  ★★★★½ Rewatched 18 Mar 2025

  I did use the word “mindfuck” to prepare my students for this beautiful and bizarre film. I was a little worried my disc might not work, so I brought next week's movie (Nausicaa) as a backup. What a different screening that would have been.

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  West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty 1979

  ★★★★★ Watched 16 Mar 2025

  In the 1970s, Med Hondo, filmmaker of Mauritanian and Senegalese descent, directed an impressively budgeted, centuries-spanning, satirical, Brechtian musical about slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, and European nativism.

  The movie is even greater and wilder than that description would suggest. I have never seen anything quite like this, and I don't understand why we're not all talking about this. Utterly engaging, made with impeccable craftsmanship. Possibly my favorite discovery through the 2022 Sight & Sound critics' poll. On the Criterion Channel in the U.S., and in desperate need of a quality physical release.

Popular reviews

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  Tron 1982

  Rewatched 10 Mar 2025

  It’s interesting screening something for a film class when you remember disliking that film watching it for the first time in a film class. But it’s a film tech milestone, and it’s really grown on me since I first watched it as an undergrad.

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  A Complete Unknown 2024

  ★★★ Watched 08 Jan 2025

  Most important thing I “learned” from this movie is that Pete Seeger’s wife was Japanese.

  Pleasantly surprised. But I went in with dirt-low expectations. As a 60s-80s rock nerd, I tend to hate music biopics, and several people whose taste I respect had little good to say about this. The movie basically feels like a competent adaptation of a Broadway jukebox musical. That might sound like an insult, but it’s not meant to be. (Jersey Boys the musical is a…

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