Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
A Serious Man – 8
A hilarious riff by the Coen Bros on growing up Jewish in St. Louis Park, 1967. A latter-day Job (though I should re-read the book), beset by calamity after another, with allusions as well to Sodom and Gomorrah, while Larry seeks to find out how Hashem talks to mortals, and what he is saying. The […]
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 […]