Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Lovers Rock – 6
The second installment of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, Lovers Rock was a disappointment. Unlike The Mangrove, it had almost no story and just as little context. The acting was convincing and I’m sure there were dance parties that looked and felt just like that in West London in 1980 (I read). Maybe it was convincing as […]
First Cow – 7
A short story of a movie (unlike, say, Kelly Reichardt’s earlier period Western, Meek’s Cutoff), which tries to absorb us into the gentle friendship between a sweet but slow trail cook and a more ambitious Chinese frontier entrepreneur. Their business of selling dolly-cakes could also be read as a metaphor for American capitalism: the drive […]
Nomadland – 8.5
Finally, a serious movie. And I mean, serious. Beautifully photographed empty landscapes of the American West set a metaphorical scene for the bleak nomadic life of the widowed, childless Fern, living in a van, subsisting on minimum-wage temporary jobs when she can find them, meeting other nomads but resisting any close connections. I can’t say […]
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – 5
Not fun. Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman play characters that are so unremittingly unpleasant you almost don’t want them onscreen, and the usually reliable Jeremy Shamos is just as bad–that is, sickly fawning–in the other direction. The movie comes across as a play: e.g., stop the action while a character tells his life story. The […]
The Mangrove – 9
Exhilarating. The story combines George Floyd and the Chicago 7 in 1970 London, and I was stunned at the end to learn it was also based on a true story. Steve McQueen creates a foreign world–a community of Caribbean immigrants in Notting Hill–and populates it with people we believe in and come to care deeply […]