Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
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.
A Man Most Wanted – 8
A totally engrossing spy thriller from John LeCarre’s novel put us right back in the world of Homeland, The Honorable Wpoman and Chinatown, all of which we watched on home TV last week. Washed-out cinematography put us in the grey underworld of Hamburg, and Philip Seymour Hoffman dominated the screen like a beached whale. The […]
Begin Again – 7
There are worse ways to spend a Thursday afternoon than watching Keira Knightley morph from nice-looking to irresistible – it’s in the eyes (not the teeth) – and listening to decent music – more like Once than Kinky Boots – although I can’t say the same for the Mark Ruffalo character. The story itself ranged […]
Get On Up – 5
A mess of a movie, somewhat salvaged by an extraordinary performance by Chadwick Boseman. A bunch of disconnected scenes add up, dramatically, to nothing. The scenes of James Brown’s youth, weakly reminiscent of the much better Ray, explain little, although one is rather surprised that as a youth he had no rhythm and couldn’t carry […]