Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Challengers 2024

  ★★★½ Watched 01 Mar 2025

  The real will-they/won’t-they is all get knee injuries.

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  The Grand Budapest Hotel 2014

  ★★★½ Watched 28 Feb 2025

  I wonder what Wes Anderson, Roy Andersson, and Peter Greenaway think of each others’ work. They sometimes end up at similar places after taking wholly dissimilar routes.

Popular reviews

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  Bird 2024

  ★★★★★ Watched 16 Nov 2024

  David Cronenberg once said that he considers everything that happens before a movie starts—getting to the theater, finding your seat, the opening credits—a “vestibule” between the outside world and the world of the film. Wild choice for Regal to lead us into Bird with a trailer for Kraven the Hunter.

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  There are artists who never want to do the same thing twice and artists who are who they are, are interested in what they’re interested in, and just want…

• 

  Semiotic Plastic 2021

  ★★ Watched 20 May 2024

  I’m all in on the concept of a wordless film telling the story of one human life (or maybe the “life” of humanity) through a series of toy tableaus.

  The strengths of this work are (1) its use of largely static sequences broken up by scenes in which wind-up toys charge through crowds of frozen friends and (2) blocking that creates stage pictures without immediate/obvious meaning.

  The weaknesses—which, by the end of its 22 minutes had taken me all the…

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