Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  The Fabelmans 2022

  ★★★½ Watched 21 Mar 2023

  I verbalized this much better to Isabel than I can remember right now…

  I didn’t enjoy watching this film in the same way I have enjoyed other Spielberg flicks. His greatest films use the medium of movie to fantasize, imagine, and talk about human narrative in ways film especially serves—and this wanted to talk about that “movie moment” from a director’s perspective in a perhaps too-direct way. This made me, more than I wanted to, reflect on the act of…

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  Triangle of Sadness 2022

  ★★★★ Watched 12 Mar 2023

  I greatly enjoyed this film! It reminded me a lot of the director’s past project, The Square—there are some really interesting decisions, and the movie is made with confident direction, but this confidence leads to sag in weaker parts of what is ultimately both an idiosyncratic and overindulgent voice.

  I often come back to think of the scene in The Square where the actor imitates an ape and dominates, transforms a banquet into a tense hostage situation through their commitment…

Popular reviews

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  EO 2022

  ★★★★★ Watched 21 Jan 2023

  I waffled between 4.5 and 5 stars for EO, for several niche reasons. I greatly enjoyed this film on several fronts. If you are a cinephile, this is master-class cinematography, editing, and working of narrative—the protagonist’s perspective doesn’t frequently rely on cheap convention to capture the experience and perspective of a donkey. (And all under 90 minutes!)

  More importantly to me (and more difficult to write about) is the film’s attempt to further the dialogue of Earthling compassion. While the…

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  White Noise 2022

  ★★½ Watched 01 Jan 2023 1

  We watched this shortly after Banshees of Inisherin which is a terrible point of comparison for this film.

  Both rely on dialogue for flavor, and have ᕦ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ᕤ personalities through character voice—but Banshees was so much tighter and less performative. Both have consistent use of set and scene and design, but this much more loudly (usually good, but still too chaotic for my taste). 

  I thought Driver was great, Gerwig terrible/lazy, but my main gripe for lowering my…