Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Hustlers – 2
No redeeming social value. Weak acting (except Julia Stiles, who appeared to drop in from a different movie), threadbare plot (no suspense or even forward momentum), endlessly repeating scenes (strip club, strip club backstage, ludicrous sexual encounters), unsympathetic characters (sex club customers and stripper-hustlers), plus gratuitous cartoon effects (the stripper who continually vomited). Jennifer Lopez […]
Marriage Story – 7
Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver both give remarkably sensitive portrayals of a couple who love each other but can’t get along, and your sympathy slides from one to the other in the world of grey that real people inhabit. Everyone else, oddly enough, is a caricature. This sets the stars apart but ultimately cheapens the […]
Knives Out – 7.9
As opposed to JoJo Rabbit, which tried – unsuccessfully, in my view – to mix slapstick with serious matter, Knives Out never faltered from its tone: spoof. The whodunit plot clicked into place marvelously, and all the characters got what they deserved , unless you consider the 85-year-old patriarch’s slitting his throat to have been a tad […]
JoJo Rabbit – 6.5
An inventive mishmash of relationships with different, and largely incompatible, tones: JoJo and his friend Yorkie – traditional comic; JoJo and his mother (Scarlett Johansson, why?) – serious and tragic; JoJo and Adolf Hitler – absurdist comic; JoJo and Elsa – sweetly romantic; JoJo and Captain K (wonderful Sam Rockwell) – slapstick; JoJo and Jews […]
The Irishman – 7.5
Robert DeNiro is an emotional black hole at the center of this 3-hour gangster epic. He is the narrator, speaking (to whom?) from a wheelchair in his nursing home, but I never felt anything from or about his extraordinary journey from trucker to hitman to union boss to convict to relic, not from his relationships to […]