Writer for Slant Magazine and the Harvard Film Archive, cinematographer (Ham on Rye) and musician (Mines Falls).
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A Dim Valley 2020
"Colvin’s follow-up to Sabbatical (2014) trades its predecessor’s Bressonian severity for a slippery form reminiscent of both Jacques Rivette and Hayao Miyazaki, but shares with it a certain reductivist ethos. The eastern Kentucky woodlands where the film was shot—the region around Colvin’s hometown—comes into focus not through fawning landscape shots but through a series of partial views and offscreen soundscapes, and the same approach is taken with regard to narrative and character psychology. The film opens on a syncopated montage…
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Poison 1991
"Todd Haynes is known for his chameleonic ability to slip into different aesthetic skins for each project in ways that enrich his material with deeper subtext. Poison, his 1991 debut feature, illustrates that tendency in supercharged form. In exploring the subject of social deviance and the violent groupthink that tends to materialize around it in American society, he combines three separate short stories into a larger, chaotically ricocheting whole, with each segment drawing on disparate modes of visual storytelling: tabloid…
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Foxcatcher 2014
Until now I’ve been hopelessly ignorant. Foxcatcher reveals a deep dark secret about America, and the secret is this: this country’s legacy is founded upon an unhealthy mix of greed, wealth and megalomania. It’s truly upsetting to hear now as a citizen of this country for over two decades that there may be something evil brewing beneath the sterilized narratives of American excellence and glory portrayed in mass media. How could I have been in the dark for so long…
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Spotlight 2015
Due equally in part to my own experience living in Boston for 6 years and to the much-discussed blandness of Tom McCarthy’s visual chops, I found myself watching the background a lot during Spotlight’s runtime, dwelling on the margins of what was in front of me not unlike the impatient reporters at the heart of its story. One of my findings was the film’s treatment of Harpoon IPA as the flagship beer of Boston. With the lone exception of a…
