Category: Film
My collected writing on one of my greatest passions: film. I was a film critic in my undergraduate days (trivia: that’s how I met my wife!) but I now take a more philosophical approach to thinking and writing about films I see.
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Thunderbolts*
Schreier | 2025 | USA | IMAX An encounter with art has two sides: you find the art as it is but on the reverse, art finds you as *you* are. The latter consideration is as underappreciated as it is salient; all we have is our emotional response. Suffice to say, l’ve been “going through […]
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Drop
Landon | 2025 | USA Had the thought “I would’ve loved this back when I was first getting into movies” and that’s the headline: I’ve simply seen too many movies and this one didn’t care to subvert my expectations. (Also: it didn’t seem to know how to be commentary on abuse despite manifestly wanting to […]
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The Monkey
Perkins | 2025 | USA Another in a collection of films I’ll call “curiosities”: films which don’t really tick all of my boxes but which I’m glad somebody made (so we can continue to have nice things). I laughed a fair bit in the early going — mostly at Tatiana Maslany’s irreverent line readings — […]
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Sinners
Coogler | 2025 | USA | IMAX Something rather special, and I’m instantly wanting to see it again. The IMAX sequences were breathtaking and reminded me of why I fell in love with moviegoing. Not sure if it’s good or bad that I saw this while in an existential funk, as I’ve been feeling increasingly […]
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Baby Driver
Wright | 2017 | UK, USA 5th or 6th watch. One of those movies I will never be able to divorce from the memory of watching it for the first time (with The Girl on a rainy afternoon in Boston). A week later I was driving, alone, through the desert toward Alamogordo, New Mexico, listening […]
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Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny
Lynch | 2006 | USA Umpteenth viewing. Good for a revisit every couple of years, and crazy that it’s almost 20 years old now. I’ve had the soundtrack in regular rotation for as long. There are underrated bits of clever craft that elevate this past mere stoner comedy, like the cuts between the shroom-induced hallucinations […]
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A Minecraft Movie
Hess | 2025 | USA The marketing for this film really worked on the little guy, despite the fact that he’s never played Minecraft and doesn’t really know what it is. And so… his first movie in a cinema was the one he wanted to see. We cuddled. We ate popcorn. We danced to the […]
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Lost Highway
Lynch | 1997 | France, USA My year of David Lynch continues with what might be my favourite yet. Here the echoes of Twin Peaks resound rather clearly, and in ways that extend beyond red velvet curtains. Sound is the thing with a Lynch film, and it does a lot of the work here. Above […]
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Death of a Unicorn
Scharfman | 2025 | USA I guess we’re at the point where A24 movies are a genre unto themselves, and this movie feels like the salient indicator. I’d have been more excited about such a development 5-6 years ago, but starting with Bodies Bodies Bodies the guiding question has become “how violent can we make […]
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The Souvenir: Part II
Hogg | 2021 | USA, UK Second viewing. In recent years, l’ve become somewhat obsessed with memory as a concept, and art-as-memory is a component of that obsession. When you convert memory into art, you freeze it in time and thereafter you can engage with it as an artifact of having previously engaged with the […]