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Recent reviews

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  No Other Land 2024

  ★★★★★ Watched 10 Mar 2025

  As Yuval says in the movie, "Somebody watches something, they're touched, and then?" Basel replies, "exactly." While in the movie, they're referring to the power and peril of social media exposure that many dispossessed have harnessed for their social movements, it cuts to the contradictory heart of the medium of political documentary itself (and even the Oscar win).

  This doc is so similar to "5 Broken Cameras" (2012) (another Palestinian documentary centered on resistance to brutal Israeli military and settler…

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  Nickel Boys 2024

  ★★★★½ Watched 28 Jan 2025

  Went into this not knowing anything about the novel or the adaptation so this was a happy surprise.

  I went in expecting boilerplate, linear, golden-hued Oscar-bait. What I got instead was an extremely disorienting, non-linear, and multi-perspectival narrative that only revealed its hand in the final moments (but I'm also quite slow when it comes to guessing "twists"). In some ways it feels like a direct response to 12 Years A Slave and its "unflinching" depictions of violence on enslaved…

Popular reviews

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  Godzilla Minus One 2023

  ★★ Watched 16 Jun 2024

  Come on man.

  The three really amazing kaiju action sequences really have people out here claiming that this is one of the best movies of the year?

  On the surface, if you extract Godzilla from the movie, you have the most bland "imperial solider has PTSD and overcomes it through re-establishing social bonds within a similarly unrepentant post-imperial society" narrative. That is the same as any post-Iraq War movie that Hollywood has churned out (except a number of those are…

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  The Sympathizer 2024

  ★★★★ Watched 15 Apr 2024

  First ep thoughts:

  - RDJ plays RDJ, which isn't particularly revelatory but is always fun.
  - Hoa Xuande is overall incredible despite some wooden delivery in a few scenes
  - A very tight telling of a labyrinthine narrative from the novel for a first ep, thanks to screenplay by Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar
  - Extremely welcome to see large portion of the episode featuring Vietnamese dialogue
  - All the classic Park transition shots are there!

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