Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
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 […]
Made You Look – 7
A workmanlike talkumentary about the Knoedler Gallery’s sale of 60 forged AbEx paintings, in which all sides are presented but only one is credible. There was nothing here I hadn’t read in ArtNews, but it was interesting to see the characters in person, especially gallerist Ann Freedman, whose icy but unconvincing resolve that she wasn’t […]
Promising Young Woman – 6.5
This is either (1) a biting critique of sex-hungry men (i.e., all men) who take advantage of defenseless women and the women who enable them; and/or (2) a horror film about a psychopath who seeks revenge on all around her through a series of impossible actions. The climax is so implausible that you realize you’d […]