Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Scream 1996

  ★★★½ Watched 08 Oct 2023

  The genre-savvy commentary is so self-evidently vapid and empty that this movie would completely crater if there were nothing else up its sleeve. That it skates by is due solely to impeccable adults-cosplaying-as-children vibes and some excellent casting—of course Lillard walks away with the ending, but McGowan is also effortlessly charming in a way that does a lot to buoy the middle stretches for me. Still, if the sequels hang themselves on more of the same metacommentary that thinks it's…

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  Saw X 2023

  ★★★★ Watched 28 Sep 2023 3

  Simultaneously ascended fanfic and the best damn movie of the series—thirteen years after they fucked him with Final Chapter, Greutert decided to come back and prove himself once and for all. Shockingly structurally sound for a post–Saw II sequel, and yet it relishes in what feels like tying up the whole series with a blood-stained bow, in an out-and-out love letter to the people who've become our plucky hero John Kramer and his lovable gang. Genuinely touching in its clear…

Popular reviews

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  Her 2013

  Added 11

  When I first saw this movie, freshman year of college, I was miserable. Part of that was your garden-variety anxiety and depression, which I still suffer from. Another part was that I was trans and didn't yet know it. But another part was that I was not a good person.

  Not to say that I am one now. But at the time, I was so much worse. I was selfish, arrogant, and bitter, and the year prior I'd permanently destroyed…

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  The Matrix 1999

  ★★★★★ Rewatched 14 Sep 2021 3

  The only element of this that consistently hadn't worked for me in the past—across both my too-cool-for-it college viewing and my revelatory revisit in theaters—was Trinity's confession of love for Neo. It was a contrivance, a screenwriting trick too clever by half, something the characters hadn't made me believe.

  This viewing, that "I love you" crashed into me. Because of course it's a contrivance, just as every bit of messianic destiny and prophecy in the film is. All of it…

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