Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
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Top Films of 2015
Queen of Versailles – 8
One of those lucky documentaries that ran into a bigger story than the filmmaker could have anticipated – not that the largest house in America, the original story, wasn’t big. Instead, Lauren Greenfield wound up with a microcosm of the U.S. financial meltdown of 2008-09. Easy credit fueled David Siegel’s time-share empire and then brought […]
Premium Rush – 5
The highlight of this film is the Who’s Baba O’Riley, which plays during the opening and closing credits. Everything in between is just silly, starting with the characters and ending with the plot. For awhile, the rush of the bicycles in midtown Manhattan traffic carried me along, but that eventually grew tiresome and that was […]
Elena – 7.8
So Russian, so Dostoevsky, so Cranes Are Flying, so Crime and Punishment! The camera never moves and the characters move slowly (except, notably, the flashing lifeguard). Everything is stolid, everything so mundane. The story, too, is stolid: a murder is committed, and gotten away with, for the benefit of the least deserving young man and […]
Intouchables – 4
Pure hokum. Again, the curse of the “based on a true story.” No screenwriter would’ve dared come up with such an unlikely, farfetched story if he hadn’t had the stranger-than-fiction truth to egg him on. I couldn’t find a laugh all night, although the ladies behind me practically guffawed. As for me, it was a […]
Last Ride – 7.9
At bottom, this is the same story as Beasts of the Southern Wild, with a little less color but without any of that movie’s flaws. Instead of a sick father raising his daughter with tough love to prepare her for the world, here was a doomed father running from the law, raising his son with […]