Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
The Imitation Game – 8
This was a schizophrenic film: was it about Alan Turing’s cracking the Nazis’ Enigma code, or was it about Britain’s cruel criminalization of homosexuality? The film’s scenes jockeyed back and forth, up to and including the closing credits. Fortunately, both stories were quite good, although my two biggest reservations sprung from the latter: Benedict Cumberbatch’s […]
Top 5 – 5.5
This romcom was more romance than comedy, and once you got past the disappointment of its not being very funny you could see its sweetness, in a hip-hop way. Rosario Dawson was the center around which it swirled; if we didn’t know Chris Rock was a star in his own right he would have seem […]
Foxcatcher – 5
Another entry on my list of “Based on a true story” makes a bad movie. Characters and events were so extreme that no reasonable screenwriter could have sold them, but the fact that something like this actually happened helped remove the no-one-will-believe-this filter. Steve Carrell’s John DuPont was such a one-dimensional obvious nutcase from the […]
Citizenfour – 4
As much as I admire, and in awe of, Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, this wasn’t much of a movie. It was static, very limited in scope and didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. How did Snowden get everything and take it with him to Hong Kong? How could he communicate it to […]
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night – 7
From the Cinema of the Bizarre, an Iranian vampire love story, filmed with about a $10,000 budget and seven actors. The ending left the audience looking at each other in bemusement, but until that point it was sort of a fun story that made sense on its own terms. It’s funny how I left The […]