Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Small Axe – 9
Although I gave Mangrove my vote for (co-)best film of 2021, I haven’t separately reviewed the other four installments of Steve McQueen’s five-part reminiscence of West Indian life in racist London in the ’70s and ’80s. Each film stands on its own, although all share a common venue and sensibility: Black Londoners trying to get along […]
Undine – 6.8
More style than substance, Christian Petzold’s fourth film was a disappointment after his remarkable earlier trio of Barbara, Phoenix and Transit. The title plus a Wikipedia search clued you in to the possible water-spriteness of the female lead (the excellent Paula Beer), but the myth in question didn’t track the plot, nor was it clear why Undine […]
The Father – 8
A gem of a movie, narrow in scope but enlarged by the great acting of Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman. By confining the set to, basically, two rooms and a hallway, we were forced into the mind of the father, struggling absent-mindedly with dementia. The film is mercifully short, as we get the picture early […]
Dear Comrades – 7.5
A retrograde anti-propaganda film, if such there be, taking down Soviet Communism for its top-down bureaucracy that creates inequality, inertia, oppression and distrust. Filmed in black-and-white and recalling Russian cinema of the late ’50s (The Cranes Are Flying, Ballad of A Soldier, etc.), Andrei Konchalovsky’s take on a 1962 workers’ strike that was brutally suppressed is […]
The Mole Agent – 8
This was a charming journey inside a senior citizens center in Chile, reminiscent of Laura Gabbert’s Sunset Story but with less plot. In fact, what plot there was seemed to be a set-up: I don’t believe there was a client concerned that her mother was being mistreated; I think that was a ruse to get this […]