Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Selma – 8.1
A very good story told well, not biting off too much or chewing anything too hard. Seemingly filmed in brown-and-white, the film captured a moment in our nation’s history that is worth preserving and thinking about, raising questions of what is different 50 years later and what isn’t. The acting was excellent – including Oprah […]
Interstellar – 5.5
If a little Matthew McConaughey – as, say, in Mud – goes a long way, more than two hours of him saving the human species is a very long trip. Anne Hathaway is more to my liking, but like Sandra Bullock in Gravity she was quite buttoned up. “Interstellar” seemed to refer to all the […]
Wild – 7.5
Reese witherspoon was extremely nice company to spend two hours with, and I don’t begrudge any awards she might garner. Not having read Cheryl Strayed’s book, however, I never quite got why or how she carried out such a daunting wilderness trek, why she didn’t get lost or sick or see more fellow hikers. The […]
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 […]