Favorites are my top films of the past 4 years.
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Babylon 2022
Utterly blown away by this wild, propulsive, orgiastic evisceration of the corrupting power of Hollywood!
It is the anti-Singing in the Rain, a nihilistic look at periods of transition in art, and how the powers funding that art will chew up and spit out the artists who don't fit their new definition of the form.
And then when we look back on these periods, revering the art and adoring the actors and creatives, we forget to humanize them and think…
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The Batman 2022
Matt Reeves' The Batman is the evolution of the superhero film that I have been waiting for!
The last few years have found varying degrees of success with superhero films taking the trappings of other genres and grafting them onto their DNA, be it the coming-of-age spriteliness of Spider-Man or Shazam, the Wuxia action of Shang-Chi, or the cold-war spy paranoia of Black Widow. But all of these films tend to throw off their genre disguise in a third act…
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Fast X 2023
Fast X was a frustrating film to watch.
To start with, Jason Momoa might just be the best villain in the entire franchise, and the opening act culminating in the Rome set piece was excellent. After that first act, I was beginning to think this film might just pull the series out of the slump it has been in since Furious 7.
But then the film devolves into a structural mess.
The characters are split up across 5 separate storylines,…
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Egghead & Twinkie 2023
Egghead & Twinkie is an absolute delight!
Melding the hyperactive editing and joke-dense visual stylings of films like Scott Pilgrim and The Mitchells vs The Machines with a sincere coming of age rom-com story anchored by two great first time performances.
There are elements that certainly mark it as a low-budget first feature, but its storytelling craft and huge heart are sure to win you over.
This is an excellent calling-card for filmmaker Sarah Kambe Holland, so I am excited to see what she does next and where this delightful little film can go!
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Suspiria 2018
Suspiria is art-house horror at its most pretentious and impenetrable, but if you can resonate on its unique wavelength, you will find a film experience like no other this year.
The plot is simple, and borrows its basic premise from Dario Argento's 1977 masterwork: Susie Bannion, a young woman from small-town America, arrives at the Markos Dance Academy in Berlin and soon discovers that it is run by a coven of witches. This simple story masks a sprawling, thematically dense…
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Three Identical Strangers 2018
While this is a bizarrely fascinating story, it is presented as a series of "big reveals", without really digging into the emotional trauma of the situation.
Facts are presented in a signposted manner, such that otherwise throw-away lines scream "this will be important later", making each reveal feel like a clinical piece of a puzzle, rather than an event that had a real emotional impact on the individuals at the heart of the story.
In the end, you are left feeling like you heard a sensationalist story to sprinkle into dinner conversation, but didn't really learn anything new about humanity.
