Favorite films

  • Portrait of a Lady on Fire
  • The Fountain
  • The Green Knight
  • La La Land

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  • The Creator

    ★★½

  • The Fountain

    ★★★★★

  • El Conde

    ★★

  • Big George Foreman

    ★★★½

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  • Theater Camp

    Theater Camp

    ★★★★

    A spot-on and absolutely hysterical Christopher Guest-like take-down and celebration of theater kid culture, Theater Camp is warm-hearted yet scathing in its tongue-in-cheek self-critique of the absurd idiosyncrasies of the art form and its aficionados while never descending into outright mockery, resulting in a light and breezy night at the movies that even brought a tear to my eye a couple times. 

    Saw this on a whim with my 14 year-old. She’s a ballet dancer but totally connected to the “performance culture” aspect. Great movie for “artsy” families. 

    2023 RANKED

  • The Equalizer 3

    The Equalizer 3

    ★★★★½

    Setting aside the fact that I’d be tickled pink just to watch Denzel recite the first 100,000 numerals of pi through an Optimus Prime-style voice modulator, I gotta say I love how the elder Washingtonian thespian has settled into this decidedly brutish, and in this installment, downright Nosferatuesque interpretation of the 80’s TV vigilante Robert McCall in Equalizer 3, likely the fitting and stirring capper to this solid little underrated and under-the-radar trilogy for those of us sick fucks who like our…

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  • The Creator

    The Creator

    ★★½

    A stunningly realized work of original IP that gets progressively worse with each passing second, The Creator is in many ways the perfect expression of “my kind” of sci-fi, with its ridiculously lived-in District 9 meets Bladerunner-aesthetics plus Rogue One-style militarycore, which is why it is so damn frustrating to watch given this Gareth Edwards joint’s absence of three-dimensional characters, narrative tension, or plot logic (remind me again how robots are Buddhist monks?) as it hits you over the head with its “message” of love and tolerance for AI rights? 

    Seriously. Wtf did I just watch?

    Major disappointment. 

    2023 RANKED

  • The Fountain

    The Fountain

    ★★★★★

    Sacrifice, Cosmic Cycles, and Divine Design: A Comparative Examination of the Popol Vuh and Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain

    The ancient Mesoamerican sacred text known as the Popol Vuh and acclaimed filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain emerge from two vastly different cultural and temporal landscapes, yet they share thematic entanglements that underscore timeless human preoccupations with sacrifice, mortality, and the cyclical nature of reality. Often referred to as the “Mayan Bible” due to its compelling articulation of the foundational myths, histories,…

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  • Top Gun: Maverick

    Top Gun: Maverick

    ★★★

    Less a proper movie than it is a nostalgic two-hour commercial for the military industrial complex wrapped up in a vanity project to end all vanity projects, Top Gun: Maverick thrills in spots and is overall entertaining but suffers from terrible writing jammed with clunky exposition and mostly unearned emotional beats.

    2022 RANKED

  • Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

    Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

    ★★

    Lacking thematic depth, sorely in need of narrative focus, and pathetically over-reliant on knowing by heart the plot points of a logically vacant Disney+ TV series, Doctor Strange 2 is by no means outrightly bad but could have been so much better, by leaning even more heavily into the promised horror elements and by amping up the general weirdness, occult aspects, and goddamn sorcery, given it is a Dr. Strange movie, for chrissake.

    The original Dr. Strange was the first…