Top Films by Year
Top Films of 2020
Top Films of 2017
Top Films of 2015
The Hero – 5
A little Sam Elliot is a delight to watch. An entire movie with nothing but closeups of Sam Elliot is rather too much. The story – an aging cowboy movie star given new life by a young girlfriend and a viral video – is neither deep nor plausible, and the secondary characters don’t do much […]
The Cage Fighter – 4
A not terribly well made documentary about a not terribly interesting man engaged, not terribly successfully, in mixed martial arts – something I’m not terribly interested in and certainly don’t enjoy watching. The filmmaker took life as he found it – and the access he achieved was remarkable; not every life, however, is worth a […]
The Salesman – 8
(fuller review TK). Real-world cinema, in this case from Iran: no special effects, no histrionics, just real people facing real situations, making choices that the viewer can admire or criticize. In other words, we are drawn into director TK’s vision and made to question our own feelings and reactions. Here, notably, we admire the lead […]
I Am Not Your Negro – 7
As much a success of style as of content: telling James Baldwin’s story through his own words, both recorded live and read posthumously, with video from the day mixed with later interviews, gave us an unusually rounded and real picture of a man we know more as a reputation.
Toni Erdmann – 1
If not the worst movie of the year, it will take something to beat it. I had read it was that rare thing, a German comedy. We waited 85 minutes for the comedy, but by then the characters were so unpleasant to watch that we gave up. The lead woman was not just unhappy below […]