Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Godzilla Minus One 2023

  ★★★½ Watched 10 Nov 2023

  “For much of Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, Toho Studios’ 33rd film in the beloved kaiju franchise, the iconic monster exists as an abstraction. After a brief, brutal rampage to start, he is kept offscreen, a shadow in the mind of our hero Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki). To a certain extent, this entirely symbolic usage is nothing new: the deeply ingrained allegory for nuclear annihilation that Ishiro Honda’s 1954 original presented has persisted, and often been adapted to fit the…

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  Anatomy of a Fall 2023

  ★★★★½ Watched 02 Oct 2023

  "Hüller in Anatomy is called upon to essentially carry the film; for all of the excellent performances and destabilizing, searching camera movements (sometimes appearing to emulate courtroom videography, crash zooms and quick pans included) and scene constructions, it likely could not hold together without her particular screen presence, a composure and confidence that always feels on the edge of breaking apart."

  Reviewed with The Zone of Interest for Taipei Mansions.

Popular reviews

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  Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022

  ★★½ Watched 19 Apr 2022 4

  "I don’t usually like to make my life and background the focus of my reviews, since my general inclinations are to let my observations assume their personality from what I choose to write about and to not interfere with the text itself. But Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once begs for me to consider it in light of this. There are certain aspects of myself that, for various reasons, I can’t bring into this piece, but suffice…

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  Crazy Rich Asians 2018

  ★★ Watched 13 Aug 2018 1

  "Crazy Rich Asians otherwise has no time or inclination to explore anything traditional in Asian culture unless it is explicitly related to the plot in a way intended to draw out the nigh-villainous qualities of the Youngs. The movie’s most fundamental and detrimental demerit is its frequent flattening of characters and centuries-old practices into one-dimensional stereotypes, conflating so many different attributes so as to create something muddled and more than a little offensive."

  Reviewed this repulsive, shallow film for The Film Stage. I got a little mad.