Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Food, Inc. -7
This was an indelicate subject made with surprising delicacy, thanks especially to a compellingly rational lead talking-head, Eric Schlosser. The glaring weakness was the lack of a two-sided argument: none of the big food companies that were vilified – Monsanto, Perdue, Tyson, etc. – were willing to be interviewed, which left me to wonder if […]
In the Loop – 7.9
Hysterically funny, at least the half I was able to catch. It was paced like a sitcom, and the performances were uniformly over-the-top, but the whole fit seamlessly together, like fingers in a glove. An especially deft and novel leitmotif was the role of 20-somethings, pulling and being hit by levers in the power corridors […]
Public Enemies – 4
What an expensively handsome emotional zero! A film eulogizing a murdering bank robber was probably misconceived to begin with, but then to direct both John Dillinger and G-man Melvin Purvis as one-dimensional ensured that our sympathies would not be engaged. The love interest, played by Marion Cotillard, set off no sparks, either. The only character […]
Seraphine – 3
I had never heard of the “naïve” artist Seraphine de Senlis, but discovering at movie’s end that she was a real person explained in large part why this film was so dramatically inert. To take but one example, Wilhelm Uhde had to flee Senlis at the outset of World War I because that actually happened, […]
The Hurt Locker – 8.5
Powerful and suspenseful, beautifully directed and acted. Together with Dexter Filkins’ amazing The Forever War, which I’m currently reading, this gives a picture of the war in Iraq that makes you wonder, over and over, what are we doing there? Who is the enemy we are fighting? It could be anyone – the man with […]