Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
The Last Station – 6
Strangely unaffecting, in a Chekovian manner. Aristocrats stand around distraught, but we don’t care. About them, the Tolstoyan movement, or Tolstoy’s copyrights. The announced theme is Love, but there is no real chemistry between Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer; and the younger couple, James McEvoy and the luscious Kerry Condon, exhibit more lust, or puppy […]
The White Ribbon – 8
Michael Haneke’s meditation on cruelty, or evil?, as embedded in German culture, or humanity?, in 1914. The father figures alternated between humiliating their women and beating their children, a lesson the children had learned all too well and practiced on the weakest among them. The world at large was not much better, as we were […]
The Blind Side – 7.5
For Hollywood cornpone, this was done well and was a lot of fun (cf. Whip It). Sandra Bullock ate up the screen, but I was just as enamored of Tim McGraw as her easygoing husband and Collins and S.J., their two age-appropriate kids. By making Michael silent and rather opaque (cf. Precious), we could focus […]
The Athlete – 5
A noble effort to tell the important story of a great African athlete, Abebe Bikila. The exciting parts, however, came from archival footage of his two Olympic victories. The movie’s focus, instead, seemed to be on his efforts to compete, after a car accident as a paraplegic, as an archer and dog-sled racer – neither […]
Aguas Verdes (Green Water) – 7
Nigel Gilchrist, noted travel writer in dialogue at the SB Museum on Thursday, pointed out how important travel was to the understanding of art: one should experience of the theatricality of everyday life in Rome to appreciate the works of Caravaggio, Bernini, et al. The same can be said for the cinema, and our recent […]