Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Will-o’-the-Wisp 2022

  Watched 31 May 2023

  Will-o’-the-Wisp Overturns Political Precedent.
  Pedro Rodrigues’s surrealist satire turns progressivism inside out.

  In response to the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, British synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys recorded “Will-o-the-Wisp” to commemorate desire that can’t be legislated, that resists discipline. Few pop artists are so politically daring, but Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues’s newest work, also titled Will-o’-the-Wisp (Fogo-Fátuo), is even more outrageous.

  Rodrigues structures several time-skipping vignettes about the passage of ungovernable political ideas that satirize…

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  The Little Mermaid 2023

  Watched 26 May 2023 3

  The Little Mermaid’s Revoke-and-Change Agenda.
  Disney’s ‘looks-like-me’ movement politicizes entertainment.

  Everything is social engineering in the new live-action version of The Little Mermaid. It changes Hans Christian Andersen’s Danish fairy tale — a touchstone of Western culture — and revokes its preeminence, reworking its amphibious Scandinavian heroine’s image to resemble that of a biracial American teenager (Ariel, played by pop singer Halle Bailey) that suits contemporary, racialized politics.

  This new version of The Little Mermaid reboots the unaccountably popular 1989…

Popular reviews

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  Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022

  Watched 08 Jul 2022 18

  This year’s fallen movie standards match the disappointment felt everywhere — in style, messaging, and leadership. Fanboy favorite Everything Everywhere All at Once epitomized the faithlessness at the heart of comic-book culture. Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang, a Chinese immigrant laundromat owner whose American-based working-class struggles import Hong Kong action-movie agnosticism. (What contemporary Hollywood film would dare recognize the moral struggles of native white, black, Latin, or Native Americans?) Unconcerned about the existence or nature of God, Evelyn is caught…

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  Zack Snyder's Justice League 2021

  Added 42

  Despite repeated requests of six separate publicists, Warners and Sunshine Sachs declined to show me a prerelease screener of and denied me press access to Justice League. Readers may decide whether this insult is from fecklessness, incompetence or more nefarious reasons.