Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Oscar Wrongs and Rights
People frequently ask for my Oscar predictions or preferences, so I will hazard the latter. The New York Times, among others, takes the fun and guesswork out of the former by polling voters and announcing results that tend to be more accurate than they are for the political elections. To my mind, Trial of the Chicago […]
Another Round – 7
A baffling subject, at least for this non-Scandinavian: drinking alcohol, on the job and eventually to excess. Rather than condemn the practice, the movie seemed to show that it helped some, while killing others. So maybe the subject was really about mid-life (turning 40) crisis, or male bonding, with the booze as catalyst, or backdrop. […]
Crip Camp – 5
Not my cup of tea. There was a transition from home-video clips of a summer camp for handicapped teens to the fight for civil rights of the disabled leading to the ADA, but I was asleep and missed it.
Quo Vadis, Aida? – 8.5
A true story about the Serbs’ 1995 massacre of Bosnians in Srebenica is told in sidelong fashion by focusing, instead, on the motherly desperation of Aida, a Bosnian translator working for the UN in its “safe haven,” to protect her husband and two sons. Jasna Duricic is sensational as the competent and fiercely determined translator, […]
David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet – 7.5
It’s hard to “rate” a beautifully made film on the end of the world as we know it, just as it is hard to watch it. I don’t need to be reminded what humans have done to climate, habitat and the cause of biodiversity in the last 70 years, but Attenborough’s personal testimony, measured and […]