Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Buck – 5
When a documentary maker sets out to chronicle someone’s life, he or she never knows if something dramatic will occur that will make the finished documentary exciting, emotional, or at least interesting. In this case, the story of horse trainer Buck Branaman, nothing happened and the result is, frankly, boring. If watching horses in a […]
Tree of Life – 5
There was no shortage of ambition, or pretension, in Terrence Malick’s fifth opus, which complements, for some reason, the evolution of the universe with the arc of one average man’s (Malick’s?) life in Waco, Texas. Young Jack has steely eyes, and his bildungsroman might have made a good story, although how he morphs into the […]
13 Assassins – 7
A quintessential samurai movie (I forget the Japanese word for this genre), replete with the gathering of ronin, the revenge motive, the uncouth jester, and the bloody battle at the end. There is a hint, maybe more, of a larger message: what a waste this is, wouldn’t it be better if we devoted our energies […]
Super 8 – 7.5
After wandering out of Bad Teacher, I dropped in to the adjoining theater to see why the local paper had given this movie four stars. Accordingly, I didn’t see the first twenty minutes, but I sort of think that any “explanation” I missed is beside the point. This was E.T. for the age of video games, and […]
Bad Teacher – 1
A vile movie. If the moviemakers’ idea of fun is mocking public school teachers as fat, naive and overly conscientious and contrasting them with a glib, irresponsible gold-digging character played by glamorous Cameron Diaz, then my audience didn’t get it. After fifteen minutes of buffoonery producing nary a laugh, I quit the theater, not wishing to […]