Favorite films
Don’t forget to select your favorite films!
Recent activity
All
Recent reviews
More-
The Dead Don't Hurt 2023
Fair warning: this is a Western but its storytelling mode is aggressively Scandinavian. If you don't like European arthouse, you probably won't like this. It's slow, it's understated, it avoids giving you what you think you want, there's a lot of silence and orchestral music and courtly gestures of love.
A romantic weepie that eschews all the emotionally manipulative tricks of the genre, in the process drawing out a catharsis of regret, shame, grief, and love so intense I physically…
Translated from by -
The Blue Angels 2024
To get it out of the way, this is US military propaganda. Every tightly-knit high pressure subculture has its shadows and you can draw your own conclusions about how hard-hitting this movie ever would have been allowed to be!
On the other hand, it is effective, fun-to-watch, emotionally affecting propaganda that highlights many of my favorite things about America. At our best, we do have honor and meritocracy and teamwork and excellence in diversity. If we only tell ourselves stories about how we fail our ideals, we're burying half of the best global potential for a better future on autocrats' behalf.
Translated from by
Popular reviews
More-
Oppenheimer 2023
It has beautiful sequences. It has many accomplished actors. But there's nothing that challenged my longstanding belief that Christopher Nolan is the dumb person's intellectual film-maker. If you've read much of anything about 20th-century physics or war history, Oppie is like watching the paste-eating kid in the class slowly catch up. Even if you've read more than a couple Madeleine L'engle books. Also, except for one stand-out sequence, Nolan's acting and framing choices are stultifying.
Translated from by -
Ordinary Angels 2024
#seenunseen
Workmanlike, cliched, riddled with plot constraints that make no sense, devoid of any critique of the systems that have failed the people involved. Hilary Swank is slumming it.The bright spots are that stories about these kinds of people need to be told and that the relationships between the dad and the girls are warm and true to life. It's a shame that a promising story and decent performances are overshadowed by trite and unambitious writing and directing.
Translated from by
