Writer for Slant Magazine and the Harvard Film Archive, cinematographer (Ham on Rye) and musician (Mines Falls).
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Godland 2022
"If the trajectory of his stories feels predictable, Pálmason’s direction almost never does, and that’s certainly the case as Godland transitions from a church in Denmark to the hinterlands of Iceland and finally to a remote village within this island nation. At the center of this expedition is Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), a priest assigned to make the arduous trek overseas and build a church for the native people. He’s based on a real historical figure who explored Iceland’s southeast…
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The Tale of King Crab 2021
"Much like their speculative documentary Il Solengo, Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s The Tale of King Crab emerges from a bottomless well of Italian folk tradition, its narrative elaborately draped in veils of hearsay and scuttlebutt. Again, our unreliable narrators are a squad of grizzled old men around a farm table, their faces pockmarked from decades of manual toil and consumption of homemade wine. Set in a rustic hunting lodge in the present day, the film’s opening scene…
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Foxcatcher 2014
Until now I’ve been hopelessly ignorant. Foxcatcher reveals a deep dark secret about America, and the secret is this: this country’s legacy is founded upon an unhealthy mix of greed, wealth and megalomania. It’s truly upsetting to hear now as a citizen of this country for over two decades that there may be something evil brewing beneath the sterilized narratives of American excellence and glory portrayed in mass media. How could I have been in the dark for so long…
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Vertigo 1958
I still largely stand by this mediocre review I wrote two years ago, but there's one new detail that I noted and want to elaborate upon: every time Scottie returns to Midge’s apartment, the visual strategy differs in relation to Scottie’s systematic termination of her from his life. The first time Hitchcock shows the two together—the second scene of the movie, before Scottie’s “met” Madeleine—the staging and cutting is fairly conventional. They’re looking at one another, engaging with one another,…
