Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Birdman – 2.5
A thoroughly unpleasant movie experience. After our friend Jeremy Shamos gets knocked out, we are left with five highly neurotic characters who have zero appeal among them. Director Inarritu heightens the unpleasantness with a distracting continuous-tracking camera shot. What’s funny is how reviewers complained that the theater-critic character was unrealistic, when the entire movie was […]
The Drop 7.5
Atmosphere, characters and great acting – what more could you want? A plot that makes sense? Nah, just keep us guessing and move it along, a la Lehane’s earlier Shutter Island. (I mean, why would a punk keep wearing a broken watch?) Tom Hardy’s near-autistic bartender was astonishing: you could read the blankness behind his […]
The Kill Team – 6
What was fascinating was trying to figure out how the filmmakers got their footage of Adam Winfield with his psychiatrist, his defense lawyer, his parents. Perhaps someone decided when he got arrested that his best hope of justice was to film everything. Getting such cooperation from codefendant Morlock, after he was sentenced to 24 years […]
Tim’s Vermeer – 5
Tedious in the extreme, even when seen on a transocean airflight. The opening montage of actual Vermeer paintings made everything that followed pale in comparison. An analogy might be watching someone without much personality dissecting a Penn & Teller magic trick for 90 minutes, as opposed to watching the trick itself.
Guardians of the Galaxy – 7.7
A good-spirited hoot of a movie. Lots of character-based laugh-out-loud moments and fun ’80s music amid all the whizzing around. It came across not so much as a Star Wars parody as a Star Wars reductio ad absurdum, with a raccoon in place of R2-D2 and a tree for 3CPO.