Favorite films

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Recent reviews

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  Stillwater 2021

  ★★½ Watched by Chris Barsanti 28 Jul 2021

  As a well-meaning, crisply acted, and richly subtextual melodrama, Stillwater can be quite satisfying when its individual elements are considered on their own. But in the aggregate, many feel out of place.

  My full review is at PopMatters.

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  Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage 2021

  ★★★ Added by Chris Barsanti

  Little too much VH1 'I Love the '90s' vibe here (why the sequence on Napster? That relates how?). But otherwise, this is a not-bad evocation of just what a septic tank American culture was in 1999. If the great musical divide at the time was Limp Bizkit vs. Backstreet Boys, is it any wonder so many of us had tuned out of anything happening in the mainstream?

Popular reviews

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  American Murder: The Family Next Door 2020

  ★★ Watched by Chris Barsanti 16 Sep 2020 4

  As an experiment in format, American Murder is intriguing. Instead of bringing people in to give fresh commentary, we have only the artifacts left behind by a seemingly ordinary family in a seemingly ordinary suburb. But as a documentary, it makes for an incomplete picture...

  My full review is at The Playlist.

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  MLK/FBI 2020

  ★★★★ Watched by Chris Barsanti 14 Sep 2020

  A knotty and compelling documentary that threads together the story of the F.B.I.’s obsession with finding compromising secrets about King with an unusually frank accounting of what some of those secrets were.

  My full review from the Toronto International Film Festival is here.