Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Belle – 6.5
It was a pleasure to luxuriate in a film where the dialogue consisted of complete sentences and the costumes, settings and actors were gorgeous. Granted, this was a pale imitation of Merchant-Ivory, and even Downton Abbey had more suspense, surprise and originality; but still it Trolloped along inoffensively and brought mist to the eye as […]
The Immigrant – 6
An unrelentingly dark picture of the Lower East Side in 1921 and the unrelentingly dark life facing penniless immigrants in New York. The story, which suffers from loose ends all over, depends on three skilled actors, all seemingly miscast. Jeremy Renner, so intense in The Hurt Locker, hardly seems the lightfooted magician. Joaquin Phoenix, a […]
Locke – 6.5
A one-person drama that is daring in conception and clever in execution; but in the end you feel it might work better as a play or a short story. We get a pretty good read on Tom Hardy’s character halfway through, and with no more surprises you wait for his car to arrive, which, metaphorically […]
Lone Survivor – 5
It was interesting to compare this to Turn!, the AMC serial about the Revolutionary War, in which the occupying British forces are automatically the bad guys, to be slaughtered without compunction. Here, the occupiers were Americans – hence, the good guys – although it was not otherwise explained why they were in Afghanistan and we […]
Under the Skin – 3
This film made no sense. Absolutely none (unless, apparently, you had read the book it was based on). Much dialogue was unintelligible and the cinematography was dreary. It even managed to make an unclothed Scarlett Johansson unattractive. [Smoking -1, incidental crowd scenes]