Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Dark Knight 7.8
Far more enjoyable than I had any reason to expect, because there was this underlying story of human relationships, motivations and emotions that carried on through the cartoon razzmatazz. The fact that three earthbound characters – played skillfully by Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman – knew Batman’s identity provided the link between those […]
Mamma Mia! 6
Going against all the reviews and the word-in-the-street, we actually liked the book of Mamma Mia! when we saw it on the stage in London. The daughter’s relationship with her mother, as she searched for her father and approached her wedding, with the separation that entailed, was touching, maybe because we were looking ahead to […]
Tell No One 6.5 (Ne le dis personne)
Before it sank under the weight of its implausibilities, I was hoping that this French psycho-thriller would, Cache-like, leave its mystery unsolved and leave us drifting in a world of unknowable terror. Instead, it went the Fugitive route and had its pediatrician hero, Alex, outrunning and outwitting the entire Paris police force and, worse, gave […]
Encounters at the End of the World 6
I’m a Werner Herzog fan and admire his quest to explore the outer limits of humanity, but this movie of Antarctica came off as little more than a personal travelogue. Try as he might, the people he interviewed were unexceptional, except for what they were doing: each, in a different realm, was examining a fundamental […]
Up the Yangtze 6.5
This was one of those documentaries where you wonder, how did the filmmaker know to pick this person to cover, and then, how did the filmmaker get access to film this scene – in this case, when the personnel manager fires Jerry, the arrogant loner who is talented but doesn’t fit the Chinese team model. […]