Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
The Soloist – 5
Ho-hum. This would’ve been a better series of newspaper columns than it was a movie; and as with all “based-on-a-true-stories,” you wondered what touches a screenwriter starting ab initio would’ve bothered including. The religious fundamentalism of the first cellist? The parlous state of the newspaper? The involvement of the L.A. mayor? None of these added […]
No One Said It Would Be Easy – 7
A movie I’d never heard of about a band I’d never heard of, and I thoroughly enjoyed them both. Shown at the Minneapolis Film Festival, this work started as a promotional video that grew, at Cloud Cult’s request, into the whole story of Greg Minowa and his personal quest to make music. It combined home […]
Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29 – 8
After a great game – and this was inarguably a great game – what’s more fun than sitting around dissecting the key plays? Now imagine having the chance to do that with all the key players who were involved in that game! Well, that’s only part of the pleasure of this film, which shows the […]
The Class – 8.5
Provocative, haunting and utterly realistic, this movie was like a Gomorrah of the classroom. I walked away not rating the movie so much as judging the individual students, the teachers, the French school system, education in general and even our contemporary society. Unlike Freedom Writers, Stand and Deliver or even Half Nelson, there was no […]
Valentino: The Last Emperor – 3
A shallow movie about a shallow man. There is not much pleasure in watching a movie intended to enshrine a vain, prissy prima donna, and what could compensate – the dresses he designed – is also given short shrift: there is really only one dress we get to see at any length. Air kisses all […]