Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  The Menu 2022

  ½ Watched 10 Dec 2022 5

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

  America has a hunger problem. And American media has an obsession with cataloging this problem. The Menu is the latest entry in an asinine saga of post-millenial thrillers which subject a cast of ignorant aristocrats to a game of perturbed class warfare. The Saw series questioned how much its post-9/11 civilians truly appreciated Life; Would You Rather presented a sickly account of us v them politicking at the dinner table, at the behest of a rich psychopath. Now, The Menu…

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  The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 31 Oct 2021 6

  EUREKA! (duh)

  "A grisly work of art."

  All you hear on the news these days is about crime and violence. Saturn's in retrograde; it's a sign o' the times. Graveyards and slaughterhouses align like rows of timelines etching out eternity. Men are sent off like cattle to die. The technology is changing; death is becoming more applicable, more accessible, and more profitable. Seeped in Vietnam-era anxieties, this sun-soaked portrait of Americana is crumbling under the weight of its own brutality.…

Recent reviews

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  Fantastic Planet 1973

  ★★★★★ Watched 21 Sep 2023 2

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

  EUREKA!

  I often think that the movies are inherently meant to offer a different, more fantastical perspective on the world we inhabit; another side to the story that is Life, in order to teach us more about Earth and its inhabitants. Enter Fantastic Planet, an exemplary rendition of that notion.

  By exaggerating the mindless carnage of the wild, and pitting humans as a species inferior to a dominant blue-skinned race of gargantuan, metaphysical intellectuals, René Laloux's sci-fi spectacle ponders our…

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  The Bling Ring 2013

  ★★★½ Watched 17 Sep 2023

  Bourgeois, why would you care for more?
  They gave you almost everything.
  You believed almost anything.

  EUREKA?

  A curiously sexless void where individuality goes to die. This beige wonderland of pink-hued overcast posits Life as seen through an Instagram filter. Suburban LA, illusory and quasi-divine; in every dreamhome a heartache. Coppola's bland imagery traps her unaffected contestants in a box wrapped in tinfoil, like a Christmas gift waiting to be opened and at once forgotten about.

  These kids represent their…

Popular reviews

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  Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 2023

  ★★½ Watched 03 Jun 2023 14

  Has the emotional depth of a TV commercial yet desperately tries to convince the audience all throughout that its drama is anything more than tired clichés and exhausting plot divergences. It's a safe bet: a stylistic marvel that's committed to boisterous action and flashy animation (all of which gets pretty obnoxious at certain points, admittedly), feigns drama with familiar story beats so audiences will eat it up and score tickets to the sequel before the release date is even announced.…

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  Oppenheimer 2023

  ★★ Watched 28 Jul 2023 15

  Christopher Nolan is the David Cage of filmmakers. If you know anything about Cage, that probably sounds like a major insult. But as I've aged, I've actually grown a sort of fondness for the old sport (workplace harrassment accusations notwithstanding; I'm talking primarily as a writer/director), so I don't necessarily mean it as such.

  Cage is an ideas guy first and foremost. A "what if!" mentality drives his creativity, and the actual girth of his plotting is normally riddled with…