Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Nebraska – 8
Bruce Dern plays a Midwestern Lear in the role of a lifetime (I know, because I saw his other career highlights in a Film Festival tribute the next day) and June Squibb is an Oscar-worthy match for Jennifer Lawrence in an uncannily similar role; but what most intrigued me was the son, played uncomfortably by […]
Film Festival Tributes
Notes from the Tribute Evenings at the 2014 Santa Barbara International Film Festival January 30, David O. Russell: I didn’t “get” I Heart Huckabees when it came out, and apparently I wasn’t alone. David O. Russell seemed almost willing to disown it, saying his life was at a bad point when he directed it and […]
Big Bad Wolves – 8.5
This had everything Quentin Tarantino could want in a movie – suspense, outrageous gore, great characters and humor everywhere – which is presumably why he calls it the best movie of the year. The plot contains just enough ambiguity to keep you guessing, and the shocker of an ending either explains it all or leaves […]
Lee Daniels’ The Butler – 5
Purest hokum. Every president since Ike and every civil rights moment since Brown v. Board of Education is seen through the eyes of a White House butler, and in order to compress them all, plus the growth of the Black Power movement, into the space of this movie, there’s not much room for subtlety or […]
Fruitvale Station – 8
This movie crept up on me. Watching on an airplane, I couldn’t make out some dialogue, and nothing much out of the ordinary seemed to be happening. The character of Oscar continued to build. Yes, he was a bit of a fuck-up: he cheated on his girl, he was hotheaded, he was fired from his […]