Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  Paris, Texas 1984

  ★★★★★ Watched 12 Jul 2021 12

  The America of Paris, Texas is an America of horizons. Grass-flecked deserts that go on for miles, hills that crest and recede far past where we can see them, and sunsets that sweep across everything in sight, the earth descending into twilight blue as the sky dances in hues of gold and purple. Even when Travis Henderson sits on the hill top of his brother's swanky L.A. home the city lights below him stretch for so far, glitter and blink…

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  Days 2020

  ★★★★ Watched 31 Jan 2022 4

  I watch the rain fall from the dining room of my country house. The grass glistens and the dirt turns to mud in the drizzle. Blue-grey light washes across my face and I can see my reflection faint on the window's glass. The thrum gets louder and the trickle becomes a downpour. I shift in my seat and my neck aches. I keep watching.

  I open my curtains and see the highway wall that runs past my apartment. The sound…

Recent reviews

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  Talk to Me 2022

  ★★★ Watched 27 Aug 2023

  Never better than in first half, when it's as much a sociological study of smart teenagers at their dumbest, how at a certain age almost every negative emotion gets wrapped up in the prickly container of "boredom" and how that boredom evolves into sometimes-very-stupid boundary-pushing (all of it obsessively documented and jeered at and mocked). The more the boredom is actually some deeper, darker emotion, the stupider the stunts get, and while its version of "communing with the dead =…

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  The White Ribbon 2009

  ★★★★ Watched 29 Jul 2023 2

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

  The mystery at the heart of The White Ribbon is very rarely the focus of its story. In fact, it's barely a mystery at all; it's clear from the first moments we see the pastor's children, hyper-polite Klara and bitter hang-dog-eyed Martin, stalking the perimeter of one of their village's random acts of violence that they, and the posse of schoolchildren who gather around them like baby geese following their parents, are responsible. Most of the story's action, rather, happens…

Popular reviews

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  Nomadland 2020

  ★★½ Watched 24 Mar 2021 12

  As if independent film's lingering obsession with Malick fucked a Vox explainer on the ripple effects of the '08 housing crash. It's at its best when it embraces the oral tradition and lets Real People tell their stories in warmly lit wide-angle close-ups, but it's telling that those moments come and go in bite-sized snippets that are largely window dressing for Nomadland's real obsession: watching Francis McDormand perform poverty against self-consciously-beautiful Western backdrops. There's an argument to be made that…

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  Sweetgrass 2009

  ★★★★ Watched 17 Aug 2020 9

  For a couple years after I moved to Atlanta I sometimes worked as a camera assistant for a corporate video company. A lot of their clients were agriculture-related, and for one series of videos we traveled to a handful of farms across the U.S.: I visited peanut farms in south Georgia, Oklahoma, and Virginia, and worked on a tractor ad in rural Oregon. My primary job was to sit in the backseat of a car as we drove between locations,…