handcrafted artisanal film criticism - often imitated never duplicated - accept no substitutes

recent activity and selected highlights

A Day in the Country (Depardon) - Screen Slate, Feb 23 2026

Raymond Depardon - Documentary, Feb 20 2026

Crime 101 - Sight & Sound, Feb 6 2026

“A Most Violent Year: Vampires, Families, 2025 in Film” - Filmmaker, winter 2025

The movies of 2025 are movies about violence: what forms it takes, who it serves and, in particular, what inhibits or disinhibits it.

Marty Supreme - Reverse Shot, Dec 24 2025

The Safdies’ films are a product of the NYC dirtbag mixture of privilege and proximity to real danger, reveling in their protagonists’ bad decisions and flaunting what most Columbia Grammar parents would call bad taste.

Jia Zhangke - Mubi Notebook, June 7 2025

What constitutes “realism,” when reality itself has changed so vastly, so comprehensively? The elasticity of the term is the defining quality of Jia’s filmography, which, in telling the story of people living through immense social change, variously reaches for strange effects, formal wooliness, and reflexivity. His films are a canvas stretched across the frame of a world forever in flux.

The Roaring Twenties - The Criterion Collection, spine #1208

Following a hood whose fortunes rise and fall over the course of the Prohibition era, Walsh’s film traces a familiar genre arc that in 1939 already seemed like a marker of a very specific bygone moment in American cinema—the period between the verbal freedom of the early years of talking pictures and the behavioral restrictions ushered in by the Production Code.

“Jacques Derrida Loves This Banana Bread” - Screen Slate, Nov 18 2022

So little in New York City is the same as it was 20 years ago; Film Forum’s banana bread sign is an aide-mémoire for many people, for many reasons. To celebrate its 20th birthday, I spoke to a number of people for whom the sign has significance. We spoke about Derrida, his philosophy, and his hair; about the making and marketing of the 2002 documentary Derrida, a Film Forum premiere; about Film Forum, its culture and concessions; about the state of cinema and the media at the turn of the 21st century; about the changing face of downtown Manhattan—and we spoke about the haunting (and, to my mind, unresolved) ambiguity as to what Jacques Derrida really said about Film Forum’s banana bread, and what he meant.

“Good Boys: Channing Tatum and His Magic Mikes, Keanu Reeves, Johnny Knoxville, Simon Rex, and the Himbo Ascendent“ - Animus, Apr 11

As Instagram pushes public-facing people to conform to unrealistic body-image expectations, and as evolving standards of behaviour have reframed some alpha-dogging traits as toxic, we’ve harvested a lush crop of men onto whom to project our expectations of unproblematic masculinity.

“Everybody’s In Showbiz: The ‘80s Downtown Actors of Miami Vice” - Filmmaker, spring 2021

In drawing its supporting cast from New York theater actors in general, and downtown celebrities in particular, Miami Vice became a harbinger of the greater fluidity between New York and Los Angeles, stage and television, independent and corporate that would come in alongside premium cable, location shooting and the Golden Age of Television—and a vivid, sidelong portrait of the years that Downtown 1980s bohemia broke.

teaching

New Jersey Institute of Technology

HUM 101 - Writing, Speaking, Thinking (freshman comp, basically), Fall 2018 semester

University of Iceland

The American Suburbs in Fiction & Film, elective of my own design, Spring 2014 and 2017 semesters

“What Was Hollywood” module in interdisciplinary seminar for MA in English, Spring 2017 semester

Brit Lit I, Fall 2016 semester

Writing About Literature, required craft course for BA in English, Fall 2014, 2015, 2016 semesters

dvd essays etc

Blink and You’ll Miss Me zine (with Charles Bramesco) - A24

Dream Team - Yellow Veil

The Roaring Twenties - The Criterion Collection