Favorite films

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1986

★★★½ Watched 19 May 2025

Once you get on a wavelength with this and Cop au Vin they become kind of fascinatingly perverse exercises. The classic story of a brilliant detective who comes to town and wrong-foots all the comfortable people in his ruthless pursuit of truth, except the detective is just a total asshole whose methods are often crude or even thuggish and who doesn't even really deploy them in the service of morally principled ends. A playful satire of middle-class complacency in which the disrupting figure may be no better than his investigative subjects.

1986

★★★★ Watched 11 May 2025

*Almost* too straightforward to be great, with wonderfully suggestive rural atmosphere but a relative lack of interest in anything that doesn't take it where it's going; you can read this as a laudable focus on emotion or a modest unwillingness to plumb its own available depths, as you choose. But it's so well-acted, looks SO good - we used to light movies! - and takes its sort of Animal-Kingdom-in-Delco narrative to such grim places that it's hard not to be compelled. Not perfect but very good.

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2000

★★★★½ 3

Look, Timbaland does the beats and Jet Li fights a person using the body of another person and I honestly don't know what the fuck else you want.

2024

6

As I watched Anora, which I often found very funny and engaging, I began to wonder why I was so impatient for the movie to introduce a narrative development I hadn't seen in the trailer. It *can* be damaging to this kind of would-be madcap enterprise to have a clear sense of all its major beats, but a well-made and entertaining film can usually transcend that, and on the merits it was not clear to me why Anora seemed not…

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