Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Theater: A View from the Bridge
The contrast, on back-to-back nights, between Donald Margulies’ new play, Time Stands Still, and a revival of the Arthur Miller chestnut, A View from the Bridge, made me reflect that a golden age of drama, like the Greeks experienced or like the Rodgers and Hammerstein era of the musical, has passed. Margulies’ work was facile […]
Wild Grass – 4
This movie signifies the decline of French civilization, or French cinema, or the career of Alain Resnais. Or maybe, as other reviewers claim, it is a masterpiece. To me, nothing made sense. Unlike Marienbad, where inscrutability created a mood and fomented ratiocinization, here the musical score was unduly portentous and the characters left me cold. I […]
Get Him to the Greek – 7.8
A pitch-perfect sendup of the music business, school of Spinal Tap. Numerous laugh-out-loud scenes mixed with man-love, gross sex, and nebbishy boy-girl love – the Judd Apatow formula that I’m a sucker for. Sean Combs was a revelation – give that man an Oscar! – while Russell Brand and Jonah Hill were brilliant. (How did […]
I Am Love – 6.5
A bizarre movie, Italian-style. There were shades of Antonioni and Visconti’s The Leopard, with Tilda Swinton as a blonde Russian fitting in or not. Based on the title, I was expecting a moral about love; but love seemed to go in every direction, based on which characters you considered. The director cut away from each […]
Please Give – 7
An idiosyncratic story about – or at least, a look at – relationships among five women and one man living more or less next door to each other, very much in Manhattan. Oliver Platt was bit pudgy for my taste, but the five women were pitch-perfect: my fave was Rebecca Hall (again!) in the Charlotte […]