Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Past Lives 2023

  ★★½ Watched 06 Dec 2023

  Pleasant and charming but only that, never quite rising to any emotional truth that didn’t feel forecasted from a lifetime ago. I’m not even sure if I thought the acting was very good? John Magaro pauses forever before responding to any line and I think maybe Song wants you to read that pause as a man patiently reviewing his emotional options and not… how people don’t talk? Then again, I relate to that anxiety, knowing the person you love is…

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  Godzilla Minus One 2023

  ★★★★ Watched 03 Dec 2023

  Echoes of a somber empire, a validation of life, a grotesque transcendence of an epochal Weenie. Awe as driving force behind any hope that we’ll learn anything from the atrocities that have become so genetic they are now sci-fi iconism.

Popular reviews

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  Capone 2020

  ★ Watched 22 Apr 2020 8

  I have been asked by the PR company to take down the review due to an embargo they only just now informed me is in effect.

  EDIT -- Embargo up, here was my original review:

  As redolent of pee and poop as Hard to Be a God; as miserable and creeping as The Death of Louis XIV; very grotesque and dumb. Somehow there is no joy to be had in watching Al Capone in a diaper, smoking a carrot, mowing…

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  Ambulance 2022

  ★★★★ Watched 05 Apr 2022

  “LA drivers! They’re all mamalukes.” - Randazzo, disposable pig-nosed Italian

  I thought of Seijun Suzuki during this, how the audience’s perspective is all that matters, the camera the only source of spatial truth, especially when working in the impossibly small ambulance set against the impossibly sprawling (and geographically absurd) City of LA. This is how Jake Gyllenhaal can hide behind a neon vest with a huge gun, how a man can survive a ruptured spleen and four hands inside of…