Favorite films

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Recent reviews

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  Eternals 2021

  ★★½ Watched by Amy Hensarling 18 Jan 2022 2

  Eternals is … fine? Snyder cut lite? Anyone? Anyone?

  Very late to the party here. Personal pros/cons below.

  +’s:

  Barry Keoghan gives far & away the best performance in an otherwise basic group. No other standout imo, but he was good.

  Nice to see a Madden/Harington reunion, however brief. Instant nostalgia warp, which I’m not sure was a productive sensation since it yanks us right outta the MCU? Grateful nonetheless.

  Comic relief = typical cringe, but hey. At least it’s Kumail this…

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  Everyone Says I Love You 1996

  ★★★½ Watched by Amy Hensarling 18 Jan 2022 5

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

  Everyone Says I Love You is incredible in the fact that it exists at all. It’s a musical sung by actors who can’t sing in a magical, faraway land where Goldie Hawn is Woody’s ex & Julia Roberts falls for his charms. Drew Barrymore’s attracted to a criminal Tim Roth (who also serenades?!), Ed Norton dances gleefully on a tabletop, and Billy Crudup harmonizes with a cab driver in a taxi. 

  …

  And I haven’t even mentioned the Groucho Marx impersonators,…

Popular reviews

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  The Tragedy of Macbeth 2021

  ★★★★½ Watched by Amy Hensarling 17 Jan 2022 14

  Coen's staging of Macbeth's sequence with the witches is ingenious: Rather than showing us the witches stirring their pot, he positions them up in the rafters like birds, looming over Macbeth, while the floor beneath his feet becomes a bubbling cauldron.

  Again and again, the director takes some of the most famous moments in the history of the theater and gives them a sense of abstraction. Macbeth's castle looks like something out of a surrealist painting, with its rows of…

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  Licorice Pizza 2021

  ★★★½ Watched by Amy Hensarling 09 Jan 2022 12

  The heart wants what it wants, or else it does not care.
  —Emily Dickinson

  In one of his many terrific Inherent Vice reviews, my friend Frank quoted an excerpt from a Marc Maron interview with Paul Thomas Anderson. Maron asked what Inherent Vice was about. PTA replied: 

  "It's about Pynchon. That's the first thing that pops in my mind. Followed really quickly right behind that, it's about the ex-old lady—that you may have, or I may have, or we all may have—who…