Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
It Was Just An Accident – 7.8
Remarkably filmed sub rosa in Iran, Accident told a story of torture and revenge with compelling directness and lots of close-ups. Some of the set pieces went on too long, which drained some suspense, but that may have been Jafar Panahi’s intention. (Would the Golden Globes consider this a comedy?) A bit threadbare for Best Picture, […]
Sound of Falling – 7.6
A very arty, elegiac and cryptic, but not unpleasant, look at women’s lot in a poor East German farmhouse in three or four discreet early 20th-century years, intercut and largely unresolved. It helped that the director warned, this was not a film about plot or characters; it was an experience that we should float along. […]
Song Sung Blue – 8
Music can make you happy, and this film did, over and over. Good songs, sung with joy to enthusiastic audiences, were played to the end but smartly intercut with snippets of the characters’ daily lives, so they never outstayed their welcome. The characters were all people you rooted for (cf. Marty Supreme) and enjoyed being […]
Marty Supreme P.S.
Given the critical accolades tossed at Josh Safdie and Timothee Chalamet’s film, it’s worth recalling, even a month later, the main reasons I labelled Marty Supreme “unwatchable.” 1. Marty’s character, which dominates the film, is so abhorrent any possibility of “enjoying” the movie evaporates. Yes, Chalamet does a remarkable acting job, presumably at Safdie’s direction, of […]
Nuremberg – 6
It’s tricky to make a modern historical drama where the viewer has his own context to compare. It doesn’t help when the American characters played by Michael Shannon and Remi Malek come across as clueless and incompetent, while Russell Crowe’s Hermann Goering is masterful and compelling. But the film seems populated by symbolic figures, not […]