Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Greenwich Village: Music that Defined a Generation – 6.5
Perfectly pleasant if forgettable scrapbook of memories from the ’60s: Peter, Paul & Mary, Phil Ochs, Buffy Ste-Marie, Judy Collins, Don McLean, John Sebastian and many more. If you hadn’t been there, however, I’m not sure what, if anything, the movie would have meant to you. Plus, it featured annoying cartoon flashes between scenes and […]
A Royal Affair – 7.5
The title and the opening scene give away all suspense, so what we are left with is a Danish Lincoln, which undoubtedly means more to the Danes than us Yanks. The costumes are nice, but can’t compare to recent dramas from the French court. It’s fun to meet actors we’ve never seen, although Queen Caroline […]
One Mile Above – 2
There is not a single scene in this film from Taiwan that is either original or credible. The acting is amateurish and the story has the sophistication of a yak. One complaint of many: time after time our hero is thrown into a treacherous situation – wild dogs attacking, crashing off a hillside, wrecking his […]
Boucherie Halal – 7
There is a story, but mainly this is a feature-length indictment of Muslim culture and, indirectly, the peril of non-assimilation, in this case into Canadian society. Wives are abused, treated as chattel, and sons are in thrall to hard-line parents. The “spiritual leader” ruins everyone around him and is finally arrested, symbolically, for sending money […]
Shyamal Uncle Turns Off the Lights – 7
A small-scale Indian Ikiru, in which a dotty old man brushes his teeth, gets his flip-flops mended and dogs the local bureaucracy until he gets the streetlights near his house turned off when the sun comes up. It is what is known in painting as a genre scene. I can’t imagine what an Indian would […]