Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Top Ten – 2010
1. Winter’s Bone. The most authentic, least Hollywood of the bunch, with acting that didn’t seem like acting (compare Jennifer Lawrence to Hailee Steinfeld) and a gripping, unpredictable story.
Zambezi – 1
Two second-rate TV ‘specials’ covering the upper and lower halves of the river, but nothing distinguished one part of the river from another, or this river from any other. Shots of animals often had no connection to the river, in any case, and were nothing we didn’t see in better films 20 years ago. A […]
Troubadours – 1
This was such an annoying film I’d give it a negative score if I could. Different rock eras were conflated and confused, and no legitimate story line emerged. The filmmaker took his access to the James Taylor/Carole King Reunion Tour and purported to base the story of the Troubadour nightclub in L.A. on it, but […]
Nostalgia for Light – 3
If there was a connection between Chilean astronomers searching out celestial bodies and Chilean widows digging nearby in the Atacama Desert for bones of the “disappeared,” I slept through it, one story being told as slowly and undramatically as the other. The widows’ quest struck me as particularly pointless, but that may just be me.
The Still Moment – 5.5
This is the kiond of film a film festival is for: totally uncommercial, produced on a used shoestring, aimed at a mini-market – but made with such singleness of purpose that its message comes through pure and clear (unlike Nostalgia, Zambezi and Troubadours, below). The message: surfing is about oneness with nature, with commitment and […]