Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Napoleon – 4
Perhaps Ridley Scott watched The Crown and thought, Hey, I can do this for France. Unfortunately, his swings at royal romance, political intrigue and historical drama were all whiffs. For some reason, Joaquin Phoenix as the lead was made to appear uncharismatic, uncoordinated, a terrible lover, phlegmatic and taciturn – hardly the image of the […]
Maestro – 4
Hard to decide what bothered me more: the bizarre accents and clipped, unintelligible dialogue from Bradley Cooper, especially, and Carey Mulligan; the characters’, especially Cooper’s, obsessive smoking; or the lack of a plot. Rather than care for Lenny Bernstein, I couldn’t wait for this unpleasant person to get off the screen. Sarah Silverman, on the […]
The Holdovers – 7.9
A throwback movie in every sense from the reliably delightful Alexander Payne, it even made me like Paul Giamatti as the curmudgeonly prep school teacher with a well hidden heart of gold. As someone who spent three snowy Decembers at a boys’ school outside Boston in the ’60s, I felt a certain distant affinity for […]
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour – 7
I had to take this in in two sittings, it was so long and so loud (as was the audience of young women). It’s hard to find fault with Taylor Swift, and I couldn’t. Some songs were better than others, but it probably helped if you knew them all by heart, as most of the […]
Anatomy of a Fall – 8
A French psycho-drama from Justine Triet and production company “didshedoit.com,” which is the movie’s hook. The director prejudiced the question whether the husband’s fall was a suicide or a murder by making the prosecution witnesses bombastic and the prosecutor smarmy and not good-looking, as against a sympathetic defendant (a measured and marvelous Sandra Huller) and […]