Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
In the Heights – 6.5
Not exactly Rent, not quite West Side Story, but a clear precursor to Hamilton. The story was far too thin to support the boatload of production numbers that followed on each other’s heels–so many that, despite their individual brilliance, they became tiresome. “How about a good song, instead of another ensemble dance?,” I found myself thinking. Unless you […]
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 […]