Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Hunt for the Wilderpeople – 6.5
Sort of a Revenant Lite, with a wild pig instead of a bear and a fat 13-year-old instead of Leo DiCaprio. How could you not be charmed, though, by chubby Ricky Baker, a budding juvenile delinquent who runs away cluelessly into the New Zealand outback, where the redoubtable Sam Neill grudgingly tolerates him, then grows fond. […]
Zero Days – 6.5
The story is better than the storytelling. How many people do we need to hear saying, “I can’t comment,” in order to grasp that a virus to destabilize Iran’s nuclear program is a state secret, an obvious fact to begin with. Then there is the problem of how to film computer code, which supplies the […]
Microbe and Gasoline – 5
A summer piffle – watchable mainly because it was French. Nothing was believable, or terribly charming, if that was the justification. Two young boys on an adventure, but it didn’t make us care about them or identify with any of their experiences. How much better was Mud, for example.
The Innocents – 6.8
For me, this was too much of the same thing. It was beautifully shot – one of those films you remember as black-and-white, even though it was in color, with every other shot framed like a painting, a Vermeer or Hammershoi or Tooker. The lead actress was easy on the eyes, but the nuns all […]
A Man Afar – 5
I was left totally blank – which, not coincidentally, was the main character’s only expression – by this story of an older dental technician in Caracas who picks up young men for his sexually deviate purposes and doesn’t mind being beaten up, rejected and exploited. Then at the end he maybe manipulates his young charge […]