Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Happening – 7
A one-trick pony on an unpleasant journey. I take it this was based on Annie Ernaux’s experience seeking an illegal abortion in 1963 France (similar in monotone to her 2002 memoir which I’m currently reading about her affair with a Russian diplomat). The acting was impeccable and realistic, a la Francaise, but the film wasn’t […]
Avatar: The Way of Water – 5
What a spectacle, what a production! If there was an ounce of originality in the story or characters, however, I missed it. The dialogue might as well have been cartoon bubbles; action scenes came straight from Moby Dick, Wizard of Oz and Titanic, just to name obvious sources. Any drama was dissipated by the three-hour length. And […]
All Quiet on the Western Front – 7.9
As movies showing the horror of war go, this is hard to beat–more realistic and thus more powerful than 1917. In fact, that is perhaps the sole purpose of the film. There are characters, but we are told nothing about them, any more than we know about the pawn or the knight on a chessboard. The […]
All The Beauty and the Bloodshed – 7
This was three films in one, but none dug as deeply as I would have liked. Nan Goldin’s crusade to make museums expunge the Sackler name bookended the documentary, but we never saw how the museums grappled with the issue. Second was Nan Goldin’s loveless upbringing, which produced the film’s title and her sister’s suicide, […]
Top Ten 2022
It has become traditional at year’s end that I look back and select ten memorable films I’ve seen in the preceding twelve months, and I shall hew to tradition, even though a look back convinces me that this was the worst year of cinema I can remember. Was it a hangover from the pandemic? A […]