Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
Water & Power – 6.5
This documentary tackled a fascinating subject – water rights in California – but left me with more questions than answers. It approached the topic from several different angles but never tied them together. The people of East Porterville had no running water for three years. Something called the Monterey Amendments set water allocations behind closed […]
Their Finest – 7.8
A movie about a plucky woman in wartime Britain making a movie about a plucky woman in wartime Britain, graced with the ever-pleasant figures of Bill Nighy and Gemma Arterton. The period details seemed just right, as was the mixture of wartime horror and cinema fantasy.
Baby Driver – 5.5
This seems to be the buzz-generator of early summer, but that speaks more to the paucity of good movies than BD’s merits. Anson Elgort’s moves and cool are appealing, and Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm are wonderfully scary bad guys, but that’s about it. The soundtrack is loud and unrelenting but doesn’t make much sense, […]
Beatriz at Dinner – 7.5
Fine acting by Salma Hayek and John Lithgow overcame a shaky plot premise to let us enjoy a roundelay of cleverly caricatured dinner guests. It is easy to read the movie as a parable of Democratic versus Republican values with an unfortunate ending, but the pleasures along the way were smaller, like hearing what cocktails […]
Wonder Woman 6
Silly fun, marred for me by a climactic battle that was befuddling, overlong and beyond absurd. Until then I could enjoy the comic-book characters, especially Chris Pine, and the cinematically familiar settings of World War I trenches, British cabinet meetings and German evil. Gal Gadot got better-looking as the movie progressed, which was good because […]