Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Jay Kelly – 7.9
A smart and entertaining romp with something fun every two minutes, smartly employing a cast of 80. Writer-director Noah Baumbach is a star. George Clooney is the meta lead, playing a handsome movie star (Jay Kelly even sounds like George Clooney), which meant I always saw him as George Clooney, acting, which made me less […]
Hamnet – 6.5
Two hours of Jessie Buckley is a treat–what an actress!–but the movie is a bit of an unmodulated slog, careening from dramatic incident to dramatic incident. None of it would matter, of course, if it wasn’t William Shakespeare we were watching (and if you hadn’t read the book you might not realize who “Will” is […]
Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere – 7
I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t feel sorry for Bruce, which seemed to be the point of this film. Six years after appearing on the cover of Time and Newsweek, after three Top-5 albums, including the anthemic Born to Run and record-setting concert tours, we’re supposed to think of him as a struggling loner, getting […]
The Mastermind – 5
Kelly Reichardt’s latest addition to the slow cinema genre starts off well in a small Massachusetts city, circa 1970, with the totally pleasant Josh O’Connor’s museum heist, but then he and the film have nowhere to go and Reichardt goes there.
Blue Moon – 7.8
Aided by a comb-over, Ethan Hawke transforms to a lost-soul, lost-cause Lorenz Hart lounging in Sardi’s bar on the night that Oklahoma! opens (without him). Bobby Cannavale, Patrick Kennedy, Margaret Qualley and the uniquitous Andrew Scott are excellent foils for essentially a monologue by Hawke/Hart that never goes away. At first it is a bit […]