Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Blonde 2022

  Added 2

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

  Oh boy, oh jeez, oh man. Where to start?

  Let’s start with the shape of the film. We don’t think about it much, but films do have shapes and structures. Blonde is structured not like a movie, but like an album. It’s split into pieces, each piece lasting anywhere between two and twenty minutes. Once a piece ends we move into the next clearly and without looking back. There are no title cards, but director Andrew Dominik distinguishes each segment…

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  In the Mood for Love 2000

  ★★★★★ Added 7

  **Not going to spoiler tag this because it’s more of an essay than a review but if you’re spoiler-sensitive consider yourself warned**

  I’ve been watching a lot of Paul Schrader’s films over the last few months (including his recently released The Card Counter, which I wholeheartedly recommend). As always, Paul gets me thinking about how much narrative art is focused on people who make important, meaningful choices that (to them at least) give their lives and souls a meaning. This line…

Popular reviews

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  Code Unknown 2000

  ★★★★★ Added 12

  In the late 90’s early 2000s these types of “hyperlink movies” were everywhere. The young Americans were making Magnolia, Pulp Fiction, and Traffic. Crash (not the good one) won an academy award. In Mexico Iñárritu made Amores Perros, then 21 Grams, and then Babel, each time iterating on themes of connectivity. In 2013 the Wachowski sisters put a stamp on the trend with their woefully under appreciated Cloud Atlas. The trend provided an opportunity for ambitious filmmakers to tell huge stories…

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  Hardcore 1979

  ★★★★★ Added 14

  Paul Schrader’s Hardcore is essential Protestant cinema. Catholics have a buffet: Scorsese and Fellini and Sion Sono’s Love Exposure and many more. Protestants must settle for less. Bergman, Herzog (but only viewed through a funhouse mirror), and most explicitly Paul Schrader are the titans of Protestant cinema, and Hardcore is one of Schrader’s finest. 

  Hardcore, on paper, is about a Midwestern businessman searching for his missing daughter in a world of porn and sex. But our protagonist Jake Van Dorn, played…

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