Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Bitter Moon 1992

  ★★ Watched 21 Aug 2023

  Simply not my thing -- I find that, generally speaking, the further an erotic thriller is from noir the less likely I am to be interested in it.

  -- Vangelis' soundtrack is good, but unfortunately at many moments, Polanski goes with a pop song that's completely wrong like 40% of the time.

  -- Great performance by Emmanuelle Seigner, tho neither she nor anyone else in the movie could convince me that Peter Coyote's plain and bland trust fund failson expat was some kind of sexually magnetic playboy, no offense.

• 

  To Die For 1995

  ★★★½ Watched 18 Aug 2023

  King of Comedy for girls (or am I supposed to say "King of Comedy but girlcoded"? I am old and out of touch). Not sure why I hadn't heard about this one until recently, especially given the cast that, especially in retrospect, is stacked. Nicole Kidman is mesmerizing and terrifying (and very funny) and there are a bunch of great supporting performances around hers, including a pair of early appearances from Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix. A few notes:

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Popular reviews

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  Ponyo 2008

  ★★★★ Rewatched 28 Jul 2019 3

  I DO have a girlfriend she just... lives in another ecosystem OKAY

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  Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker 2019

  ★★ Watched 20 Dec 2019 6

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

  JJ Abrams helpfully put three metaphors for TROS into the movie itself.

  1) a scene in which a character combs through some ruins from the original trilogy in search of a macguffin that will lead to that trilogy's villain

  2) the reanimated corpse of the original trilogy's villain dangling from the strings of a giant machine, like a marionette

  3) a scene in which a character returns from beyond the grave to explicitly disavow his actions from the previous film