Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
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Top Films of 2015
Premium Rush – 5
The highlight of this film is the Who’s Baba O’Riley, which plays during the opening and closing credits. Everything in between is just silly, starting with the characters and ending with the plot. For awhile, the rush of the bicycles in midtown Manhattan traffic carried me along, but that eventually grew tiresome and that was […]
Elena – 7.8
So Russian, so Dostoevsky, so Cranes Are Flying, so Crime and Punishment! The camera never moves and the characters move slowly (except, notably, the flashing lifeguard). Everything is stolid, everything so mundane. The story, too, is stolid: a murder is committed, and gotten away with, for the benefit of the least deserving young man and […]
Intouchables – 4
Pure hokum. Again, the curse of the “based on a true story.” No screenwriter would’ve dared come up with such an unlikely, farfetched story if he hadn’t had the stranger-than-fiction truth to egg him on. I couldn’t find a laugh all night, although the ladies behind me practically guffawed. As for me, it was a […]
Last Ride – 7.9
At bottom, this is the same story as Beasts of the Southern Wild, with a little less color but without any of that movie’s flaws. Instead of a sick father raising his daughter with tough love to prepare her for the world, here was a doomed father running from the law, raising his son with […]
Pelotero (Ballplayer) – 7.5
There’s a dance in the Dominican Republic on July 2 each year, when Major League baseball teams are permitted to sign contracts with 16-year-old Dominican ballplayers, who have this one chance to raise their entire family out of poverty. The temptation is great to lie about one’s age to command a higher signing bonus. MLB, […]