My Opinion: 8.7 || A great story beautifully filmed — dark, profound, and surprisingly funny. The play-like staging is occasionally stiff, but the movie has superb intellectual depth and emotional strength.
My Opinion: 8.8 || Very powerful movie. Starts well and just keeps getting better. Deserves to be high on anyone’s list of great films about war, courage, and sacrifice (and deep, deep cold).
My Opinion: 7.0 || A well-balanced comedy/drama that captures German unification with rich period detail. The plot itself requires some suspension of disbelief, but it’s an interesting, lightly funny, and affectionate film.
My Opinion: 5.4 || Beautifully shot but the tone is awkward and inconsistent, with a story that struggles and mostly fails to amount to something. The film continually adopts a farcical tone that’s discordant… Continue reading
My Opinion: 6.9 || Sumptuous, sensual movie with brilliant use of visuals and ambient sounds. More a sensory experience than a piece of storytelling, though, as the plot and characterizations are disappointingly thin. Notwithstanding… Continue reading
My Opinion: 6.5 || Relentlessly bleak. Devoid of characterization and plot. And numbingly slow. But — the best black-and-white cinematography I’ve ever seen. It’s a revelation. The film is like a succession of still… Continue reading
My Opinion: 9.2 || Impressive on every level — a great film.
MY OPINION: 6.1 || A story of resistance to institutionalized cruelty that’s engaging but also very familiar. We’ve seen this storyline before, from Cool Hand Luke to Papillon to every film that’s ever been… Continue reading
My Opinion: 8.0 || Not perfect, but nevertheless astonishing. The last third is particularly impressive, with a succession of brilliantly crafted images: easily among the best directed sequences I’ve ever seen. Thre are some… Continue reading
My Opinion: 6.3 || A Japanese “western” directed with all the skill you’d expect from Kurosawa. Toshirô Mifune carries the movie as the samurai Sanjuro, and he needs to because several of the other… Continue reading
I'm an author and consultant in Portland, Oregon. My novel 'Beheld' will be published this June.
