Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Wayne's World 1992

  ★★ Rewatched 01 Dec 2023 2

  Accurate representation of how one would actually make a feature film adaptation of a cable access show. It’s extremely shaggy, and kind of charming for it. Sometimes the shagginess borders on the inept though: Rob Lowe is lost here, and Tia Carrere, despite being the main reason teenage boys ever watched this more than once, isn’t much more at home. Really any time not spent with Dana Carrey feels like a miss.

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  Afire 2023

  ★★½ Watched 30 Nov 2023 3

  At various times in my life I’ve been exactly the kind of asshole at the center of this movie but even at my worst I think I would’ve recognized the extreme good fortune of having four supporting characters, one of them played by the bewitching Paula Beer, playing bit parts in my own insufferable drama. Leon, the ostensible protagonist of this multilayered but still shallow Christian Petzold drama, is not just a self-absorbed maniac, he’s a self-absorbed maniac who is…

Popular reviews

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  Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker 2019

  ★ Watched 20 Dec 2019 8

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

  Way, way back in “Episode V," when Darth Vader revealed himself to Luke Skywalker as his father, it felt like an earthquake. Suddenly a deep, telling connection was revealed, and it totally changed the way we understood the story being told.

  In J.J. Abrams’s monumentally stupid “Episode IX,” _everything_ is connected, everyone is related to everyone else, and it couldn't be less surprising, less impactful, because when everything is meant to be important, nothing is. Abrams has perverted the whole…

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  Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022

  ★★ Watched 25 Mar 2022 1

  I'm so happy that Asian-American cinema is a legit real thing now, and that we have roles like these for Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan. But I'm less happy about how pastiche cinema has become a substitute for genuine invention—I'm not sure I need another genre mashup exercise where the directors wear their influences as conspicuously on their sleeves as this. This movie doesn't even feel like sub-Tarantino fare to me; it's sub-Edgar Wright-ian, really, and that's not a…