Movies

Top Films by Year

Aquarela – 7.5

Extraordinary photography from around the world captured a dozen unrelated vignettes, except all had water, which isn’t much of a connection. The photography, augmented by the powerful, mostly dialogue-free soundtrack, forced you to think about, if not feel, The Power of Nature; The Crisis of Climate Change; and Man’s Insignificance. It was also, perhaps, the […]

Honeyland – 5.5

A rather bizarre quasi-documentary, in which we suspect nothing will ever happen, but then it does, but it isn’t much. There seemed something condescending about making a movie star of a poor Macedonian woman who kept bees and took care of an ailing mother, but maybe that is just me. Was the moral, even a […]

The Nightingale – 6

A return to the movies, particularly Westerns, of old, where the good guys are blameless and heroic, while the bad guys are evil incarnate, and the only mystery is how vengeance will be reeked. It’s not enough that the villain is a serial rapist; he also must be shown shooting innocent children and killing babies. […]

David Crosby: Remember My Name – 5

Why a biopic on David Crosby?, I wondered before I saw the movie, and 90 minutes later the question remained unanswered. Crosby’s life, as told here, is neither inspiring, entertaining, nor cautionary. His talent is obscured, the cause of his drug addiction unexplored, and the one overriding fact of his life – that everyone hates […]

Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood – 8

You are immediately in the hands of a master filmmaker and storyteller and are in for 2:40 of fun plus :05 of trademark Tarantino violence. The story is not much. The setting is pretty much everything: August 1969 in Hollywood, with tons of vintage cars, songs, marquees, famous people and those old metal ice trays […]

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