Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Vox Pop – 3.5
The opening ten minutes was a bracingly, convincingly staged school shooting and aftermath that gave me hope for an original, relevant film. The pre-Natalie Portman Celeste character then sings her original song in response to the terror, it goes You-Tube viral and the film collapses into cliche and the movie version of life. Her song […]
The Favourite – 7
A hysterical drama of little historical import, featuring lush scenery, gorgeous costumes and three actors at the top of their games: Emma Stone, Olivia Coleman and Rachel Weisz. Unfortunately, the characters they play aren’t very nice and they get progressively more unpleasant as the story unfolds, leaving one with no one to root for or […]
Widows – 5
Better than Ocean’s Eight, but not by much, this female heist movie had improbabilities piled on implausibilities, with enough loose threads to make a mitten. Viola Davis and Liam Neeson seemed an unlikely pair from the get-go (with Neeson overexposed in the trailers before the show), but the idea that the other widows would go […]
At Eternity’s Gate – 3
Unwatchable. Director Julian Schnabel gives us a portrait not of an artist, always hard to do, but of a tortured soul. In the name of art, his art not van Gogh’s, he uses a hand-held camera, bounces between French and English, repeats voice-over dialogue and shoots a lot of scenes ostensibly through Vincent’s eyes. But […]
Green Book – 8
The “feel-good” movie of the year, with scene after scene of the good guys standing up to the bigots, one great song after another filling the soundtrack, and an almost entire cast of characters the modern, educated audience could feel superior to. Danish-American Viggo Mortenson was splendid as the minor Mafioso Tony Lip and Linda […]