Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  An Autumn Afternoon 1962

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 27 Feb 2021

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

  Ozu’s final film looks again at the problem of the upper middle class marrying off daughters, with another variant in perspective. But like “Good Morning” and “ Kohayagawa Family” there is some shift back towards the comedy and nansensu stylings of the 1930s films that were once Ozu's bread and butter. And the opening credits seems to confirm this call back to 30s comedies, instead of the familiar cross hatched brown (tatami mats? Burlap?), of Ozu’s post-war films, this films…

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  The Searchers 1956

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 07 Oct 2018 3

  John Ford Ranked and Reviewed
  John Ford's most famous film is about an ex-confederate man's struggle with racism. That is kind of incredible at all levels, particularly as the film quite deliberately never gets explicit with the racism and hate and leaves his struggle unspoken but somehow constantly addressed.

  On the other hand, the man is John Wayne, and given his star power, the film cannot but help valorize him. So while he's an anti-hero struggling with his inner demons,…

Recent reviews

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  Elf 2003

  ★★★★½ Rewatched 08 Dec 2023

  A fun tradition and more or less now a classic. Certainly chock full of more quotable lines than any movie in recent memory.

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  Starling 2023

  ★★★★★ Watched 08 Dec 2023

  Beautiful short film with marvelous animation and a whimsically sad ending.

Popular reviews

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  Jojo Rabbit 2019

  ★★★★★ Watched 05 Nov 2019 1

  A film with a miraculous balance of tone and sentiment that manages to find sweetness and humanity and forgiveness in the darkest of times and offer a narrative path of humor and absurdity to counterpoint a story of the terrifying indoctrination of children and the creeping insidious terror of fascism and authoritarianism. 

  Let us not forget that children becoming fanatics selling out their parents and loved ones is no laughing matter and rooted deeply in history particularly the history of the 30s-50s. The real stories of children like Jojo are far darker and more disturbing than this fable—but we have to have hope.

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  Le Petit Soldat 1963

  ★★ Watched 18 Oct 2019

  A moderately competent intelligence assassin has a mediocre existential crisis and wants to fuck a pretty Russian girl, complete with excessively precious narration and a torrid climactic speech to camera.