Favorite films

Recent activity

• 

  ★★

• 

  ★★★½

• 

  ★★★★

• 

  ★★★

Recent reviews

• 

  The Bedroom Window 1987

  ★★ Watched by Khoi Vinh 15 Aug 2021

  It’s not just that Steve Gutenberg is all wrong for this would-be Hitchcockian thriller, it’s that it’s got none of the bonkers obsessiveness that someone like DePalma would have brought to it.

• 

  Chicken Run 2000

  ★★★½ Rewatched by Khoi Vinh 14 Aug 2021

  Marvelous craft. Makes me a little sad for all the unfulfilled potential that Aardman demonstrated in the early days.

Popular reviews

• 

  Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker 2019

  ★ Watched by Khoi Vinh 20 Dec 2019 8

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Way, way back in “Episode V," when Darth Vader revealed himself to Luke Skywalker as his father, it felt like an earthquake. Suddenly a deep, telling connection was revealed, and it totally changed the way we understood the story being told.

  In J.J. Abrams’s monumentally stupid “Episode IX,” _everything_ is connected, everyone is related to everyone else, and it couldn't be less surprising, less impactful, because when everything is meant to be important, nothing is. Abrams has perverted the whole…

• 

  John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum 2019

  ★★ Watched by Khoi Vinh 16 May 2019 1

  This is what usually happens: a film creates a compelling fantasy world and fans clamor for more. So sequels build that world out, they show more of its mechanics, its people, its history. But “John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum” demonstrates one little acknowledged principle of escalated world building: the inevitable outcome is bureaucracy. 

  
  Any fantasy (and the Wick-verse is as fantastical as any franchise) relies as much on what it doesn’t reveal as on what it does, leaving enough to the…