Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  2001: A Space Odyssey 1968

  ★★★★★ Watched 22 Feb 2023 1

  This has aged backwards: it’s still a film from the future.

Recent reviews

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  Napoleon 2023

  ★½ Rewatched 25 Nov 2023

  I’ve seen black-and-white movies with more color.

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  Napoleon 2023

  ★½ Watched 25 Nov 2023 1

  This is a movie made by people with a profound lack of interest in history. 

  Welcome to Ridley Scott’s Neverland: Napoleon looks fifty during the Siege of Toulon (he was really 24). At Waterloo, Wellington (real age, 46) appears about seventy-five. The directing legend who thinks he’ll make films forever apparently believes his male actors can be ageless too. (Vanessa Kirby’s Josephine — who was really six years older than Napoleon and forty-one when they married — stays a pristine…

Popular reviews

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  The Banshees of Inisherin 2022

  ★★★ Watched 26 Dec 2022 1

  Watched it as a double header with Bones & All. The two films (made by directors I love) frustrated me for a similar reason: the movies are so preoccupied with plot metaphor that there’s no room for real characters to live. The story shapes the protagonists, rather than the other way around.

  Here, the plot is a metaphor for the Irish Civil War. Farrell and Gleeson represent the sides of that conflict, doling out and absorbing its attendant violence and hatred.…

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  Glass Onion 2022

  ★★ Watched 29 Dec 2022 2

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

  This is a surprisingly cheap-looking movie. Exteriors are often computer generated and interiors are lit like doctors offices: there’s less atmosphere on the Glass Onion island than on the surface of Mars.

  The plot is also pretty flimsy. It leans on devices like symbolic props that stop bullets and a convenient, secret twin revealed in the second act. Flashbacks tell us all the information we weren’t given the first time, which defeats the guessing part of the whodunnit, because events and explanations…