Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  The Assistant 2019

  Watched 14 May 2023

  Begins in a way that suggests a film about the mundane drudgery of being a corporate underling, and so the typical indie minimalist aesthetic (little glimpses into the assistant's daily activities with regular jump cuts to keep things moving) feels unremarkable and obvious, a sort of commercial bastardization of Jeanne Dielman where our immersion into the ritual of labor is replaced by a more efficient, bullet-pointed version of quotidian routine.

  But then there's the scene where she goes to see…

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  TÁR 2022

  ★★ Watched 15 Oct 2022

  I keep coming back to the Juilliard masterclass and the tweeted video which subsequently comes out of it—for a film which is so invested in accurately recreating a particular milieu, which goes to great lengths in order to situate its protagonist within the real world of classical music, and which mostly succeeds in that regard, these scenes feel shoddy and misjudged at best, insidious and regressive at worst.

  The extent of Tár's sexual indiscretions, the main thread in the narrative,…

Popular reviews

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  A Dangerous Method 2011

  Rewatched 10 Jun 2022 1

  Men will literally invent therapy instead of going to therapy

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  Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones 2002

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 26 Dec 2019 3

  Forget all the backhanded compliments, all the "despite its flaws," "say what you will about the dialogue," etc etc.... Just on a surface level, this is an incredibly enjoyable and effective (and affective) Hollywood blockbuster—I don't think a better one has been made since, Speed Racer excepted. Like the other prequels, this has a really precise three act structure, but Lucas perfects the pacing in this one: the momentum of the initial action on Coruscant is carried into the middle…