Favorite films

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1971

★★★★ 3

Oh Jacques Tati, you magnificent genius. With Trafic you’ve crafted yet another visual delight that holds the viewer’s attention like a magnet lest we miss one of your astute and playful insights. Yet trying to catch every single sight gag, every subtle jab at contemporary life, seems impossible. Watching one of your films can sometimes feel like chasing after bubbles. The point I suppose isn't to catch them all but maybe to just sit back and let them wash over…

2015

★★★½ Watched 03 Jun 2025

I decided to check this one out after spotting on Criterion Channel’s monthly expiration list. And after having recently immersed myself in Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, I was curious to delve deeper into his distinctive aesthetic. Though I wasn't entirely sure what it was about, I immediately found myself drawing comparisons to Michael Haneke's similarly meticulous The White Ribbon. Corbet has apparently worked with Haneke before so the comparison wasn’t unwarranted. Both films subtly dissect the unsettling origins of authoritarianism (a…

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1980

★★★★½ Liked 7

I could just as easily have put The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in my list of favorite films, but Airplane! was my first exposure to the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker brand of lunacy so I have to give it the nod. There's really no point in writing a treatise on what makes Airplane! so great, as any amount of over-analysis of a film like this would itself spiral off into parody. Comedies generally aren't that complicated: you either find…

1946

★★★★½ Liked 1

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (released in the U.S. as Stairway to Heaven) starts as a deceptively straightforward melodrama. And in the hands of less imaginative filmmakers it probably would have been just that. A British WWII air pilot (played by David Niven) was supposed to have died in combat. But due to a bureaucratic mix-up in "heaven" (though I'm not sure that term was ever used in the film), he manages to survive…

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