Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  Blue Jean 2022

  ★★ Watched 16 Jun 2023

  Excerpted from my review for The Spool. 

  “A portrait of a closeted lesbian woman living in England during Margaret Thatcher’s oppressively homophobic 1980s reign, Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean illustrates a unique paradox for a critic. How does one navigate criticizing a film’s self-imposed binaries while also accounting for the realities of a restrictive period, the gravity of the subject matter (and parallel current circumstances), and the differentiation of what is intended as cinematic affect and what constitutes clumsy filmmaking? 

  From the…

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  Solaris 2002

  ★★★½ Rewatched 01 Mar 2023

  Discussed on Discussed on Episode 15 of Intermission. with Dan Mecca.

  Here's how I contextualized this conversation in the description of the episode:

  "Coming off a disparate and largely consistent run of projects (including most recently, the stubbornly low-key backstage musical/relationship drama, Magic Mike’s Last Dance), Soderbergh was and remains an unpredictable filmmaker who’s as likely to knock out a four-quadrant-blockbuster as an obtusely rendered conspiracy thriller throwback like Kimi.

  Today’s conversation touches on Soderbergh’s ongoing fluency switching between different…

Recent reviews

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  Blue Velvet 1986

  ★★★★½ Rewatched 26 Jan 2025

  You know that movie that you saw in high school that you thought you were better than when you were an idiot kid who watched it on a 480p rip. This is that movie for me. Many, many thoughts, but my favorite realization this time is how completely incidental each moment of the actual narrative feels in this. Just like the best noirs, it's hard to trace the contours because it's so inevitable that this is the only possible way things could happen.

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  MadS 2024

  ★★½ Watched 14 Jan 2025

  Impressive, but this starts hitting diminishing returns with its formal conceit about halfway through. Often feels like Noe-lite.

Popular reviews

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  Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! 1989

  ★★★½ Watched 13 Oct 2019

  “It’s more of a love story than a horror story.” “They can be hard to tell apart.”

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  Titane 2021

  ★★½ Watched 01 Oct 2021 3

  Heavy metal petting.

  Really feel like I should have had a stronger positive or negative reaction to this given how hard it’s trying to make me feel something.