Favorite films

Pinned reviews

• 

  I Saw the TV Glow 2024

  ★★★★ Watched 04 Jul 2024 2

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Fred Durst ripping a kid's head out of an exploding tv screen wasn't on my 2024 bingo card. But I must say, it might be the best thing I've seen all year.

  The neon pinks and swampy greens remind me not only of a kind of cosmic static, but also of a healing bruise. That's the image I just couldn't shake. A bruise --- a blooming subcutaneous wound struggling to filter out life's trauma with the same desperate gargle as…

• 

  Phantom Thread 2017

  ★★★★½ Watched 31 Jan 2024 6

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  PTA's best. Hands down. There's just so much to admire here.

  Firstly, I'm completely taken by Kriep's performance, her naturalism, the way that she captures delight, how quickly she's capable of returning to it... it's so clear that this character wants to be joyous, so much so that she is almost eager to contort herself in unnatural ways to find happiness.

  And I love all the moments where Alma finds agency, where she inserts herself into the record, corrects it,…

Recent reviews

• 

  Maria 2024

  ★★★ Watched 13 Dec 2024

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  There's a version of this that could have worked. Structurally, I'm on board, leveraging Maria's final week as a framework to chase the dragon and dip in and out of the moments that shredded her so severely.

  There's a lot of fun to be had with a hallucinated film crew, with the internal chronicling of a walking/talking deathbed. There's a lot to be mined from an aging performer who can't listen to the very same recordings that will make her…

• 

  Conclave 2024

  ★★★ Watched 28 Oct 2024 1

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  This might be the strangest possible way to depict such a thoughtful idea.

  A hermaphroditic Pope. Dan Brown, eat your heart out. There's something both soulful and silly about this reveal, something deep and cheap about what it's trying to say.

  At first, I thought this was a case of simple cross-dressing. Then, of something surgical. So I suppose, of all the available riffs on this revelation, I'm happy the story landed where it did, anchored in anomaly.

  Part of…

Popular reviews

• 

  Longlegs 2024

  ★★★ Watched 12 Sep 2024 1

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Big fan of the first half---its tone, its tension.

  Out the gate, the craft is the standout. The shot composition alone does so much to activate our spidey-sense. The framing feels purposeful and restrained, casting unassuming doors and doorways as devilish danger-filled portals. Honestly, I don't think I've ever spent this much time looking over someone else's shoulder before. Plus, there's some really top notch cinematography on the screen. The pre-headshot steeples, the payphone-adjacent split-level staircase, the beaming hayloft windows---someone…

• 

  Punch-Drunk Love 2002

  ★★★★ Watched 13 Jan 2024 1

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Sandler should stray into the indie-arthouse arena more often. This and Uncut Gems may be what I actually end up remembering him for. Toss in Reign Over Me and you've got yourself a trifecta. Little does he know it, but (in an Eternal Sunshine kind a way) these dramas may be his real legacy.  

  To me, Sandler's character embodies the film itself. He's soft but volatile. He mumbles/meanders until he explodes. He's passive, then he's not. And he connects…