Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Munich: The Edge of War – 7.5
A totally engaging if fanciful account of events surrounding the Munich conference of 1938 which hews to known historical facts and lends itself to a revisionist assessment of the agreement’s merits. The armature of the Chamberlain-Hitler negotiations supports an engaging fictional intrigue involving recent Oxford grads with minor positions in England’s and Germany’s ministries. This […]
Flee – 6.5
The first-person story of a young refugee fleeing Afghanistan in 1984 is a sure-fire heart-tugger, but at the moment it mainly reminded me of man’s inhumanity to man and our failings as a species. The comic-novel format was curious at best, less and less satisfying as the film went on. And it did go on […]
Bergman Island – 7
A dreamy travelogue through Ingmar Bergman’s island, Faro, and a screenwriter’s mind. Fortunately, she is played by Vicky Krieps (how the movie’s blurb could call her an “American” beats me) and in the movie-within-a-movie by Mia Wasikowska, both of whom lay out the uncertainties and difficulties of human relationships in full view. When you try […]
The Tragedy of Macbeth – 7.8
Powerful and sleek, this compressed Macbeth begins in intensity and never lets up. Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand are good, not great, as the title couple (and closed captioning was an aid in following the dialogue). The black-and-white cinematography, modernist architecture and insistent score create an atmosphere of constant foreboding. Kathryn Hunter’s “Sisters” helps, too. The […]
The Lost Leonardo – 7.5
The saga of “Salvador Mundi” by (perhaps) Leonardo da Vinci is the art story of the decade, and this documentary sufficiently marshaled the critical talking heads and visual evidence so that the viewer (i.e., me) felt he could make intelligent sense of what happened and, more importantly, what the painting is. Other than the slippery Yves Bouvier, […]