Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Argentina, 1985 2022

  ★★★ Watched 11 Mar 2023

  FIRST THOUGHTS:

  · Perfectly passable work of historical cinema that takes atrocities and turns them into an overly palatable, crowd-pleasing court-room drama in which outcomes are predetermined, heroes are easy to spot, and villains all but twirl their mustaches with evil.

  · Much like conventional Hollywood courtroom dramas, this hits all the expected beats - the reluctant but resolute hero, the gathering of the underestimated legal team who will put together the case, the compiling and presentation of evidence... everything…

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  Close 2022

  ★★ Watched 10 Mar 2023

  FIRST THOUGHTS:

  • I was mostly with this film for about the first half of it, but once the shift in the narrative occurs, it becomes unbearable maudlin and tells the most uninteresting version of this narrative it can tell.

  • There are really interesting themes and ideas at play here, the ways that boys are socialize and the ways the physical affection between friends is overly sexualized by those outside of the friendship - especially when boys reach a…

Popular reviews

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  The Dress 2020

  ★★ Watched 03 Feb 2022 5

  FIRST THOUGHTS:
  There are some lovely moments and bits of poetic beauty to be found in this piece, and the lead actress is really phenomenal. But like so many shorts - especially ones that get shortlisted or nominated for the Oscar - there’s a needless cruelty in the suffering that the filmmaker inflicts on his protagonist. And the film seems to be so set on showing how miserable her life is and how unhappy she is in her own body that I don’t think it’s as progressive and thoughtful as it thinks its being.

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  Found 2021

  ★½ Watched 04 Oct 2021 4

  FIRST THOUGHTS:
  There are things about this film that are fantastic, things that make it one of your standard feel-good documentaries, and things that make it one of the more ethically dubious docs I’ve seen this year. The first third plays as your standard heart-warming, character-based documentary. There are great, candid interviews with everyone, and it’s really honest about the experiences of these three teenage girls growing up as the adopted children in whites families. The second third is the…