Favorite films

Pinned reviews

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  Pigs and Battleships 1961

  ★★★★½ Watched 08 Sep 2023 2

  Criterion challenge 2023-Gasper Noe’s closet picks: wow! Blown away by this film that is set in post WW2 Japan with an American occupation. Crime story, but legitimately funny and heartbreaking, then deeply threatening and scary. Incredible world building, and composition and enough STRONG characters to honestly make you wonder what the heck happens to everybody at the end.

  An absolutely wild last 30 minutes with a ton of things I’ve never seen in a film.

  Truly a very worthy watch and I’m keen to explore more.

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  Exotica 1994

  ★★★★½ Watched 10 Aug 2023 3

  Criterion Challenge 2023: Made in Canada- Excellent! This moody and deceptively deep story of temptation, trauma and desire was a fantastic breath of fresh air. Thrilling without being a proper thriller, the meticulous storytelling here is immensely satisfying. A non chronological dreamlike storytelling experience, which is often abused now, but handled very well here. Hard not to invoke Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks here, but it isn’t the way that is often meant.

  To be clear, this is largely set…

Recent reviews

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  Mulholland Drive 2001

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 26 Sep 2023

  Once again, one of my top 20 and maybe top 10 films of all time. So nuanced and full of feeling, both justified and unjustified. A scathing indictment of the Hollywood world and a deeply emotional ride of one woman's terrifying emotional journey.

  The performances are absolutely astounding (career making for Naomi Watts, underrated for Laura Harring), the hypnotic mood is second to none and the narrative, while confusing to many, is deep and sprawling. I love how David Lynch…

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  You Hurt My Feelings 2023

  ★★★ Watched 25 Sep 2023

  A nice funny little movie, that has a lot of people creating their own problems and then being tortured by them. The idea of loving somebody even if you don’t like what they create is a fascinating one, and I have a lot of strong feelings about that. I thought this presented those questions mostly without judgement though. I was intrigued by this film since it first hit film festivals, and I really do think Julia Louis-Dreyfus is an amazing…

Popular reviews

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  Twenty-Four Eyes 1954

  ★★★★ Watched 24 Sep 2023

  Criterion Challenge 2023-Directed by Keisuke Kinoshita: this film is not well known out of Japan and that surprises me. It is considered a masterwork there, an impressive, elegant, humanistic post WWII drama that follows a young schoolteacher and her class over the years. Sounds simple, but this remarkable film explores the concepts of military service, war and jingoism, poverty and lots more. All while deftly centering human to human interaction. Just tragic, but heartfelt, and with enough sweetness to not…

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  No One Will Save You 2023

  ★★★½ Watched 23 Sep 2023

  A taut, minimalist sci-fi horror. Almost completely without spoken lines (just one) yet full of creeping sounds and atmosphere. I watched this one right as the sun was going down and it was perfect.

  I can’t stop thinking how awesome of an experience this would have been in a theater. Reductively you could say this is Signs meets Home Alone. But I really didn’t care for Signs and Home Alone never matched my cinematic sensibility. 

  Anyway, this is crafty, smart, action packed, suspenseful, frequently silent and features a notably badass performance by Dever. One of the nicest surprises all year.