The 2023 Movie List

Finally! A really good year for movies. Box office was up and people showed they’d turn out for movies they really liked. Of course this is in large part because of two movies that, in lucky happenstance, premiered the same week. Apparently, this wasn’t the plan but the anticipation, critical approval, and popularity of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” resulted in the two films reinforcing each other. I know I wasn’t the only one who saw them back to back. And not only were they popular, they were GOOD.

The films that were not so good and not so popular were the big franchise movies, especially of the superhero variety. Good riddance to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. And while I did enjoy the latest Mission Impossible movie, I’m not sure I will bother to see its sequel and find out how it ends.

So here’s hoping that Barbenheimer will convince Hollywood to take more chances on original stories, reward creativity and not take the audience for granted. With that as a preface, I saw 25 movies last year and here they are rated from best to worst.

1. Barbie

Yes, I think Barbie was a better movie than Oppenheimer, and not because I’m a sap for message movies. By reversing the gender power dynamic, it showed how clueless a privileged class can be (the women in Barbieland are no more sensitive to the feelings of the opposite sex than your your standard Lax Bro). More important “Barbie” teaches what it means to be human; Barbieland is a feminist Eden, but like Eve before her, Stereotypical Barbie wants knowledge, even if means accepting pain, and ultimately death.

2. Oppenheimer

I was lucky enough to see this movie in an IMAX theater and it was a remarkable, enthralling experience. I saw it again online and it was almost as good (being able to watch a second time with subtitles was a big help). Christopher Nolan is one of the last Great Event filmmakers and he really delivered. It’s a sprawling story about the making of the atomic bomb and the subsequent implications for Robert Oppenheimer, who oversaw the bomb’s development. (By the way, for those of you who listen to podcasts, check out the episode of my American presidents podcast, “The Celluloid President,” in which we discuss “Oppenheimer.” You can access it here.)

3. Past Lives

What claim does someone you loved as a child, a teen, or a young adult have on you when you become a mature adult? That’s the question at the center of this very moving and thought-provoking movie about childhood sweethearts in Korea who separate and then reconnect 12 years later and 12 years after that. They still have a hold on each other even though their lives are completely different. Now what?

4. Living

Technically this lovely film is from 2022 but I couldn’t see it until it appeared on Prime in mid-2023. Set in a 1953 British Public Works office, this is NOTHING like the TV show “Parks and Rec.” Bill Nighy plays a formidable, stiff-upper-lip department chief who is as far removed from Ron Swanson as you can get. Almost everyone in the department is scared of him, and since he can’t really relate to his family, he has no emotional resources to fall back upon when he gets a fatal cancer diagnosis. Having rarely if every experienced joy, he finds a way to leave a real legacy.

5. American Fiction

The funniest movie of the year. A Black author with literary aspirations is so put off by the public’s preference for racially stereotyped writers and the efforts of white would-be allies to absolve themselves of their guilty feelings that he pens an over-the-top fake memoir (“My Pofology”) that unexpectedly becomes a massive best-seller. He’s also got a messy personal life that requires some attention, too.

6. Anatomy of a Fall

Did she or didn’t she? A French movie about a successful novelist who is arrested and charged with murder when her husband is found dead from a fall from the third floor of their ski chalet. Their young son is a key witness who wants to save Mom from jail, but even he’s not sure if she’s innocent. Very absorbing courtroom drama and a fascinating look into the French justice system, which is very different from ours.

7. Air

It’s been quite a year for Matt Damon. He was the funniest character in “Oppenheimer,” and then he starred in “Air” as the real-life guy who saved Nike by signing Michael Jordan as the face of the company. This is a very enjoyable, supposedly true story, with Ben Affleck as Nike founder Phil Knight, and Viola Davis as MJ’s mother. In addition to providing insight into how the sports marketing business works (or used to work), it’s also a great vessel for early 80’s nostalgia.

8. The Holdovers

Speaking of nostalgia, the main kid in this movie seems to be the same age I was in the year during which this is set (early 1970’s). He’s attending a fancy prep school outside of Boston and is held-over at school during Christmas break in the care of a cantankerous unpopular teacher played by Paul Giamatti. They really bond during a trip to Boston, which looks very much like the grimy Boston I remember from those years. Terrifically written and acted.

9. Poor Things

Wow this is a weird movie. It’s like someone merged The Bride of Frankenstein with Alice in Wonderland and sprinkled in some soft-core porn. Set in a fantasy Victorian world where it’s possible to combine and reanimate parts of dead bodies, a mad scientist plants a baby’s brain into the body of a recent suicide and we watch her consciousness rapidly progress from that of a toddler’s to a mature woman who has a very health appetite for sexual pleasure. This is wildly imaginative and an impressive intellectual exercise, but a little difficult to warm up to.

10. Killers of the Flower Moon

The scariest moment of the year was when I looked at my watch two-and-a-half hours into this movie and realized there was still another hour left. This Martin Scorsese epic is movie-making at its ponderous best, dealing with complex moral issues through beautiful cinematography and great writing. I’d have ranked it higher except that both Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro are way too old for their parts. This is especially true for Leo, who’s character is supposedly about 25 years old.

11. May December

Julianne Moore portrays a woman who, having been sent to prison for statutory rape after having sex with a young teen her son’s age, marries the kid when she gets out of jail. Twenty years later, Natalie Portman is an actress who shows up to shadow Juianne Moore because she’s playing her in a movie. Not surprisingly, she finds a strange family dynamic where the young husband is emotionally stunted and their kids are very confused, but maybe not as confused as the actress, who tries to figure out what’s going on behind the surface and ends up exploiting everyone. There is a lot to think abut here.

12. Maestro

This is a movie about the beginning and end (but not the middle) of Leonard Bernstein’s career as the most famous figure in American classical music, a genius who wants to do everything. He wants a glamorous wife and numerous male lovers on the side; he wants to write classical music and Broadway musicals; he wants to be on TV and also be taken seriously. Bradley Cooper does a tremendous job in embodying Bernstein’s many contradictions and probably should have been nominated for best director as well as best actor.

13. The Boys in the Boat

Practically a remake of Chariots of Fire, except that it’s about an American crew team in the 1936 Olympics instead of British runners during the 1924 games. There are no surprises but director George Clooney does such a good job depicting the desperation of these Depression-era athletes that it really works.

14. Golda

Helen Mirren is almost unrecognizable as Golda Meier, who was prime minister of Israel during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It’s a very fascinating look at how the Israeli government works in a crisis, but the movie does presume a high degree of knowledge about the war’s timeline and its major players.

15. No Hard Feelings

Jennifer Lawrence is hired by the parents of a shy 19-year-old to “bring him out of his shell” (if you know what I mean) before he goes to Princeton and hi-jinx ensue. It’s very funny and very sweet if you can get over the ickiness of the parents paying a down-on-her-luck Long Island local to deflower their son.

16. Dumb Money

The protagonist of this movie if from my hometown of Brockton, Mass (where “no one here can kick our ass.” That’s actually a football chant.) Disappointingly, the movie was filmed in New Jersey and looks it. Based on a true story about the financial analyst, played by Paul Dano, who helped spur the GameStop stock mania of 2021 by touting it on Reddit. I remember it as a crazy story when it happened in real life because a whole lot of small day traders were able to bring a few short-sellers to their knees by buying an over-priced stock. Not mentioned in the movie, but after the protagonist made $20 million, he immediately moved out of Brockton!

17. Blackberry

Another true life business story, this time about the rise and fall of the Blackberry, which I still miss because my fat fingers make so many mistakes when I’m typing on an iPhone. This is one of those classic stories about a nerds/business shark marriage that works for a while and then goes astray because of hubris and incompatibility issues (and of course a superior competing product from Apple).

18. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1

Very good action movie that, like “Top Gun 2” last year, was supposed to bring people back to the movie theater. Alas, Barbenheimer did that instead. I enjoyed it but as is often the case in movies that depend on thrilling chases to keep the audience’s attention, right now I can’t remember what the whole thing was about.

19. The Book of Clarence

This movie is as offbeat as they come and I don’t know who it is aimed at. It’s a little bit funny, but not funny enough to be a comedy like “The Life of Brian,” which it most closely resembles. It’s pretty religious but not enough to be taken seriously like “The Chosen,” which it resembles a little bit. The gist of the plot is that Clarence, the brother of the Apostle Thomas, is the bad seed of the family. As bad seeds do, he decides to pose as the Messiah for the perks of being the Christ, but after getting crucified himself realizes that Jesus is the real deal. There’s also a racial angle since all the Jews are played by Black actors and all the Romans are white.

20. Guardians of The Galaxy

Guardians of the Gallery has been the only Superhero movie franchise I have been able to stomach for the past ten years, and the saga ends with a satisfying denouement. Having said that, I think one, possibly two, episodes in this franchise would have been enough.

21. You Hurt My Feelings

This has to be one of the lowest-stakes movies ever. The conflict is right there in the title. A Manhattan husband doesn’t like his wife’s new novel but tells her he does, because as every husband knows, the wrong answer to the question “Do you like my novel?” can be ten times more devastating than “Do you like my dress?” But her feelings are hurt when she eavesdrops on him and finds out the truth. That’s the proximate justification for the movie, but the film is REALLY about the disgruntlement of middle-class New Yorkers who just aren’t very good at their jobs.

22. The Lost King

To like this movie it helps a lot if you care whether Richard III really killed his nephews in the Tower in 1484. This is the mostly true story about how Phillipa Langley, a depressed Englishwoman who really believes in Richard’s innocence (which I do NOT), was able to find his body buried under a parking lot in the town of Leicester.

23. American Symphony

The year 2021 seemed to be a very good one for Jon Batiste, perhaps best known as Stephen Colbert’s bandleader. He won all kinds of awards, including an Oscar and a couple of Grammys, and had a hit record. Regrettably, his wife, the NYT columnist Suleika Jaouad, learned that her Leukemia had returned and she needed bone marrow treatment. Also, Batiste was trying to write a major classical piece called American Symphony. This documentary film captures all of this in intimate detail and you can only marvel at the highs and lows that people can experience simultaneously.

24. Elemental

Can fire and water coexist? Can they form a romantic couple? Pixar wants to know. The ancient elements of earth, wind, fire and water (and no, this is not a based on the 1960s rock band) are cartoon ethnicities trying to live in harmony in this very imaginative movie. The movie is not shy about addressing issues like racial assimilation, the immigrant experience, etc. but still manages to be fun.

25. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Was anyone asking for a fifth Indiana Jones movie? Not me. Harrison Ford looks pretty good for a guy his age. The movie begins in 1969 Greenwich Village, where Indy is being chased by Nazis (again!!!) who are trying to go back in time and change the end of World War II. There’s one excellent chase scene on a horse in the subway, but Indy is so crotchety now that the movies lacks its original zest.

26. Taylor Swift Eras Tour

I thought I’d check out what the Taylor Swift thing is all about and I mostly get in now that I’ve seen this concert film. I will say this — the single most thrilling moment of the year, cinematically, is when she dives into a previously unidentified hole in the stage. Whoa! As in many concert movies, your enjoyment depends to a large extent on how well you know the music. So I enjoyed it when I recognized the songs and was a bit bored when I didn’t. (Very impressive costume changes, though.)

27. Champions

Woody Harrelson is a talented but hotheaded basketball coach who is sentenced to community service coaching a basketball team with people with learning disabilities. This movie is very sweet but you can predict what’s going to happen. This movie is possibly listed lower than it should be, but the problem is that when I saw the title on my list of movies seen during the year I had to Google it to refresh my memory.

28. Good Grief

Dan Levy from “Schitt’s Creek” wrote, stars in and directed this story about an American in London who seems to have it all until his husband is killed in a car crash at Christmas. A year of unassuaged grieving occurs and things aren’t improved when he learns that the husband had a secret apartment in Paris where he entertained his secret boyfriend. Everyone in the movie has a lot of unresolved issues, which are eventually resolved through a series of confrontations and hard discussions.

29. Theater Camp

This an arch, semi-satirical look at the self-important counselors at a theatre camp who seem to think they are Broadway producers. It’s charming and funny for a while and then you wish everyone would just get a life.

30. You Are So Not Coming to My Bat Mitzvah

Adam Sandler has a producing deal with Netflix for which he knocks off one-to-two movies a year. This Bat Mitzvah movie is a family affair, though. Not only is he in it but his wife and daughters are too. The story revolves around the tween angst of wealthy, Jewish California girls who believe that their Bat Mitzvahs will be the crowning achievement of their lives — that and kissing a boy for the first time. The movie is a little bit funny, a little interesting but I am definitely not the target audience.

31. Are You there God? It’s Me Margaret

I am not the target audience for this movie either. It’s a dramatization of Judy Blume’s best-known novel, which takes a hard look at how difficult the tween years can be. I was surprised to see how significantly religion figures into the equation even though God is mentioned right there in the title. I respect the effort, and empathized with poor overly hormoned Margaret, but the movie gives off too much of made-for-TV vibe for me to care a lot.

32. 80 For Brady

Now this is a movie that was targeted for an audience of one: me. Four senior ladies in Boston find meaning in worshipping Tom Brady, travel to the Super Bowl and watch the greatest comeback in football history (the 34-28 win over the Atlanta Falcons in SB LI). But if you’ve ever watched Frankie and Gracie, you know the kind of antics that Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin will pull (i.e. far-fetched). These antics are fine but not really my thing.

33. Eric Clapton: Across 24 Nights

In 1991 and 1992, Eric Clapton played 24 concerts at the Albert Hall and this documentary is a stitched together presentation of the highlights, with some of his greatest hits and some lesser known songs. With no narration or subtitles explaining who he’s playing with, this movie is really for super-fans (see Taylor Swift, above). Still, experiencing “Layla” played on the big screen is worth the price of admission.

34. Murder Mystery 2

Another Adam Sandler production for Netflix. I like him, I certainly like Jennifer Aniston, and I like the European backdrops, but this is the kind of thing you only stream when there are four people in the room who can’t agree on anything else to watch.

35. Beautiful Disaster

This is the only legitimately bad movie on the list, but that’s OK because we watched in advance of attending a live podcast called How Did This Get Made?, where they dissect really sub-par movies to hilarious effect. I’d summarize the plot for you but it’s just too ridiculous.

The Best TV of 2023

I’m not sure what this says about my state of mind (or society in general) but my four favorite TV series this year featured people creating unconventional families or communities in a heartless world. There’s a lot about surviving grief on these shows, but not a lot of victimization. These are about people who soldier on without a lot of whining.

Once again, I am amazed at how little traditional network TV I watched this year. I still DVR a few shows but except for Saturday Night Live (not ranked here) I usually end of watching them on Hulu anyway. And speaking of which, Hooray for Hulu, which has the best content. I subscribe to the ad-supported service so it’s a bargain despite all the ads for depression, hair loss, and ED. Maybe one of these years I really will cut the cord. But’s hard for us Boomers to let go.

One final observation. Many of the lower-ranked shows were series that once ranked much higher. It’s surprising how quickly we tire of TV shows today. Not too long ago, a series could go on for seven or eight years with no drop-off in quality. Part of the problem is that many popular contemporary series are based on a unique premise that delights us at first and then becomes tiresome with repetition. Plus each season has a story arc with a lot of plot and character development. The long-lasting shows (like Cheers
or Seinfeld) had no story arcs — just stand-along episodes that you could watch out of order and not miss much. Those were the days.

1. Reservation Dogs (Hulu)

This was the third and final season of the most affecting TV show in years. Four teens on an Indian reservation have mourned and matured after the suicide of a fifth friend. Now we see them launched into early adulthood, with the support of their extended community. A clear-eyed comedy that refuses to make these kids victims, although they seem to have about three parents among them. The genius of the season is that it digs deeply into intergenerational story-telling and shows how one generation flows into another.

2. The Bear (Hulu)

A super-intense show about a talented chef from a dysfunctional Chicago family trying to open his own fine dining restaurant, even as he deals with his own grief and longing for connection. There’s a lot of yelling and making up after fights, although some wounds cannot be healed. This show also has the most amazing cameo appearances of the season, with multiple Oscar winners showing up for short bits. And for what it’s worth, I think this is the most conservative show of the year because it celebrates the dignity of work, doing the job right, and serving others.

3. Somebody Somewhere (Max)

Sam is an overly self-aware but emotionally blocked daughter of Kansas, who returned to her small farming town to care for her dying daughter and didn’t leave after the funeral. She’s slowly making connections and making herself vulnerable again. The show is sweet and slow-moving but it packs a punch.

4. Welcome to Wrexham (Hulu)

Who would have thought that a documentary about two actors (Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney) buying a Welsh soccer team could be so emotional and inspiring? This show is for anyone who has ever loved anything enough to keep loving it when it disappoints you.

5. Succession (Max)

I hated myself for watching Succession. On the one hand, it was the funniest show of the year. On the other hand, all the characters were either very loathsome or just a little bit loathsome. And then there was all that voyeurism. Do the fantastically rich really live like that? Not all the plotlines made sense this year, especially where presidential politics was involved, but still — it was beautifully acted, hilariously written, and gorgeously shot.

6. White Lotus (Max)

Another show with a huge budget and beautiful locations about rich white people acting badly. It introduced the much needed phrase “high-end gays.”

7. Letterkenny (Hulu)

For twelve seasons Letterkenny was the most hilarious and politically incorrect show on TV. Who knew Canadians could be so funny? 

8. The Diplomat (Netflix)

Keri Russell plays the American ambassador to the UK, in a political thriller that that combines a lot of fast-paced, jargon-rich dialogue with some of the most ridiculous plot twists you could think of. But it’s very addicting.

9. The Crown (Netflix)

The final season of The Crown is by necessity kind of a downer, considering how badly those people messed up their lives, but it’s still an emotional rumination on influence, mortality, and duty. I’m glad it’s over, though, especially since Her Majesty has subsequently died.

10. Daisy and the Six (Amazon Prime)

Very loosely based on Fleetwood Mac, Daisy and the Six is a nostalgic recreation of the music scene in the 1970s, when sex, drugs and rock and roll ruled the world. The story is a weensy bit melodramatic but the really great music, all of which I downloaded, really saved the day.

11. Jury Duty (Amazon Prime)

Ronald Gladden, a regular schmo who doesn’t realize that everyone except him is an actor in a fake jury trial, is a true hero for our times. His deep decency and commitment to do the right thing, even as the circumstances become more and more outlandish, is legitimately heart-warming.

12. Abbott Elementary (ABC)

This is the only series from old-fashioned traditional TV (ABC) that I watched this year. Abbott Elementary is a real throw-back to the days when sitcoms were reliably funny and warm. Set in a low-income elementary school in Philadelphia, it features the usual combination of characters who would never be friends in real life but who somehow manage to bond in workplace comedies. It’s mildly funny but very sweet.

13. Fargo (Hulu)

I’m taking a risk here in listing the series so high since I haven’t seen the conclusion yet, but based on the track record of the show I am hoping it sticks the landing again. Each season of Fargo is set in Minnesota, with a very decent cop investigating deep depravity, and this is creepily no different.

14. Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)

A cute show that spoofs New York City, show business, and podcasts, although you have to wonder if the writers have any idea how podcasts actually work. After only three seasons, the series is beginning to show its seams, and I feel my interest waning. The murder mystery did work, though, and as usual I never did guess the killer.

15. Poker Face (Peacock)

Very good premise for a show. Natasha Lyonne has the power to tell when people are lying but the misfortune to make friends with people who are always being murdered. She’s also on the run from a gambling casino mob boss. Often compared to Columbo, in that we know who committed the murder and enjoy the pleasure of seeing her solve the case.

16. What We Do In the Shadows (Hulu)

Season five was a bit of comeback after a mildly depressing season four, but I don’t think it will ever feel as fresh and hilarious as it did in the first couple of seasons. The premise is still funny — four clueless vampires trying to adapt to life on Staten Island — but the show is on cruise control.

17. Justified City Primeval (Hulu)

The original Justified was one of the great TV shows of the 2010s. Timothy Olyphant played a US Marshall in his native Kentucky. But in City Primeval he’s a stranger in Chicago and the combination doesn’t quite click.

18. CB Strike (Amazon Prime)

The Cormoran Strike novels are the product of JK Rowlings’ capacious imagination, featuring a gritty London detective and his aspiring partner and would-be love interest teaming up to solve brutal murders. The BBC made five of the novels into short series and we watched three of them this year. All excellent. That JK Rowlings! She really does know how to spin a tale.

19. Beckham (Netflix)

A fascinating documentary about David Beckham, soccer star, media celebrity and obsessive-compulsive patient. Unless you followed soccer, he’s one of those guys that you heard about constantly but can’t remember why, so I was glad to get the lowdown. And it was amazing. His entire life is documented on video and the producers were able to follow him from a 14-year-old teen phenomenon to his crusty self today. (By the way, between this and The Crown, I can’t understand how any famous person ever survives the British media.)

20. Winning Time (Max)

Highly entertaining but historically questionable recounting of the early LA Lakers dynasty, with a heavy focus on Magic Johnson, who has to be happy that this was cancelled after two seasons. 

21. The White House Plumbers (Max)

I haven’t wallowed in Watergate for a long time, so I appreciated the opportunity to review some of the highlights (or, rather, lowlights) of that woeful saga. This version was told from the bottom up — from the perspective of Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the guys who planned the break-in and went to jail for their troubles. How well I remember the 70’s, may they rest in peace, and yet my mouth was agape at seeing some of the crazy things I had long forgotten about.

22. Trailer Park Boys (Netflix)

Again, who ever guessed that Canadians could be this funny? We’re just catching up with this 20-year-old series about the residents of a Canadian trailer park. I would rank this higher except I feel a little uncomfortable laughing at the pathos of poor white trash.

23. Jack Ryan (Amazon Prime)

I never thought that Jim Halpert could be an action figure but turns out he’s an Boston College-trained economist who can outfight terrorists and communists. The show has a lot of shooting, explosions, and emotions and is a perfectly fine way to spend several hours in front of the TV.

24. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Another series that lasted a little longer than it should have. Anything this quirky eventually begins to become annoying. So much talking, so many outfits, so much interpersonal drama! I will say this, though: the show ended with a lot of truth. Characters this self-absorbed are unlikely to have fairytale lives.

25. Yellowstone

I thought the first season was great TV. I started to get disenchanted in the second season and by the third season I’d given up completely. There’s only so much plot that any series can bear (and so many murders, in a series that is supposed to reflect real life). Like Succession, almost all the characters are reprehensible, but Yellowstone lacks the sharp dialogue that makes Succession watchable.

Best Movies of 2022

It’s hard to get excited about the Oscars this year. At best, this was another so-so year for going to the movies. My wife and I made a concerted effort to support the cinematic experience by getting off the couch, driving to the theatre, and seeing as many films as possible on the big screen, even movies that we could have watched for “free” on our streaming service just a week later (i.e., “The Glass Onion”). And since seeing movies in the theatre is the best way to do it, my big regret of the year is letting the critics talk me out of viewing “Nope” upon release; when I decided to check in on it on Peacock, it turned out to be my favorite film of the year. I can only imagine how much more exciting it would have been in a theatre.

In furtherance of the in-person experience, I also attended my first film festival this year — the Sonoma International Film Festival (or SIFF) — which in additional being a lot of fun gave me a chance to see a lot of unknown small movies in person that I would have otherwise missed, which explains why there are so many movies on this list that you’ve probably never heard of (we saw seven movies in three days, and the only one that made a commercial splash was “The Lost City”).

I noticed two major themes in 2022. The first was an outright hostility to the rich, who were portrayed as clueless, out of touch, entitled and malevolent in a way we haven’t seen since the “Occupy Wall Street” days. I don’t know what was driving that theme but it was clearly manifested in “The Glass Onion,” “The Menu” and “Triangle of Sadness.” But an even more common subject this year was the pursuit of artistic excellence and how it causes people to go a little — or a lot — insane. And the “art” in question was wide-ranging, from music (“Tar,” “The Banshees of Inishirin,” “Elvis”) to film (“The Fablemans,” “Babylon”) to food (“The Menu”). You could even make the argument that Tom Cruise’s character was also driven by the pursuit of art in “Top Gun: Maverick,” if you can classify flying jets as an art form.

Some major omissions from the list this year. I made plans to see the new “Avatar,” but in the end I just couldn’t be bothered. I also thought I might watch “All Quiet On the Western Front,” but the war in Ukraine is real enough and I thought the movie would just be emotionally punishing. I understand there’s a movie called “Women Talking” that’s been nominated for best film but I don’t know anyone who has seen it, so — no thanks. Also not on the list — Superhero movies (except for the one Spiderman that I saw out of curiosity), horror films, or kiddie movies.

With that said, here’s the list:

1. Nope

Five years ago Jordan Peele was justly celebrated for his debut film “No Way Out,” but “Nope,” possibly the most original movie of the year and a major hit as well, gets no love. Not a single Oscar nomination and mediocre reviews. Maybe the subject matter — an apparent spaceship lurking over the California countryside — wasn’t to everyone’s liking, but this was not only thought-provoking but thrillingly directed. I have a feeling the critics didn’t like it was that it didn’t fit neatly into any particular genre — horror, drama, social commentary.

2. Top Gun: Maverick

OK, this is not a great movie, by any stretch. But the single best experience I had at the movies this year was watching the Top Gun sequel. I haven’t felt this enchanted in a movie theatre in a long time.

3. Apollo 10 /12: A Space Age Childhood

If you want to see what live was really like in the 1960s, watch this Richard Linklater nostalgia-fest. The hippies, the riots, and the assassinations get all the attention, but here’s what it was like to grow up in a normal middle-class house. The conceit of the movie is that this fourth-grade boy daydreams Walter Mitty-like that he is secretly recruited to fly the first mission to the moon. I have been begging people to watch this movie but no takers.

4. Everything Everywhere All At Once

I’ve seen my share of Metaverse movies but was still unprepared for the cornucopia of ideas that came flowing out of this story about a Korean immigrant family caught in the disjunction of the limitless universes that usually only exist in superhero movies. But then, it turns out to be a superhero movie after all, showing that we have hidden abilities we barely dream of and multiple destinies even if we can only live out one of them.

5. Babylon

This epic three-hour depiction of Hollywood as it transitioned from silent to sound movies is not for everybody, that’s for sure. According to Damien Chazelle (of “La La Land” fame), the late 1920s were a feverish, orgiastic dreamscape, where life was cheap, ambitions unbounded and raw talent rewarded and exploited. The whole thing was way over the top but I wasn’t bored for a second.

6. The Banshees of Inisherin

I read that this was being marketed as a comedy, but if so, the Irish have very dark senses of humor. Two old friends on a remote Irish island break up when the smarter one can no longer tolerate the boring, repetitive musings of the other one and demands to be left in peace to work on his music. I should put “smart one” in quotes because he chops off a finger each time the dumb one talks to him. Haha.

7. Tar

The life of an imperious symphony orchestra director spirals out of control when her “Me Too” sins catch up with her. This is Art with a capital A. You need to work hard to follow the thrust of what’s happening, which is fine because it’s mostly rewarding when you figure it out. The acting, directing, set design and writing were all great but I’d have rated it higher if the last half hour hadn’t been so confusing. I am told now that it might have been a dream sequence, which, if true, is a massive cheat.

8. The Fabelmans

A thinly veiled autobiographical depiction of Steven Spielberg’s childhood, “The Fabelmans” is a lesser Spielberg and two movies in one. The first movie is about his preternatural talent as a youthful film-maker. The other is about the collapse of his parents’ marriage. And both are suffused with a gauzy dream-like nostalgia. Every scene, as is usual in a Spielberg movie, is beautiful and stylish, but the movie as a whole doesn’t quite come together.

9. Down With The King

The best film we saw at the Sonoma International Film Festival (SIFF) was this story about a rapper who had a nervous breakdown and is recuperating in an isolated but beautiful region of the Berkshires. Nor surprisingly this very urban guy has some trouble adjusting to life in rural Massachusetts, but he eventually makes friends and attempts a comeback.

10. Spirited

Ryan Reynolds and Will Farrell — a great pairing that should have occurred to someone sooner than this — update A Christmas Carol to amusing and clever effect.

11. Good Luck To You Leo Grande

As much as I admire Emma Thompson, I never really felt the need to see her in a nude scene, but here it us. She plays an extremely uptight widow, who, having never experienced sexual pleasure, hires a sex worker to do the deed the right way. There are some surprisingly interesting themes afoot here, particularly the power dynamics among genders, classes, ages, and incomes.

12. Where the Crawdads Sing

I am surprised that this movie didn’t get more love from the awards circuit given that it was popular hit in a year where they were hard to come by. I didn’t read the best-seller this is based on but can see the appeal. It’s a murder mystery wrapped within a swamp-gothic love story and a female empowerment fantasy.

13. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

I don’t know if anyone saw “Phantom Thread” a few years ago, but this is a happy-happy version of that. Both movies are about the snobbiness of European high fashion houses in the 1950s and star Leslie Manville, but in “Mrs. Harris,” there’s no weird psycho-drama and everything works out well for the people who have good hearts.

14. Ticket To Paradise

Julia Roberts and George Clooney, divorced and rich, have a daughter who wants to marry a Polynesian sea farmer she met while on vacation. Somewhat amusingly, they squabble and insult each other while trying to prevent the poor girl from throwing her life away on kelp. The movie has a gorgeous setting but would have been better with sharper and less cliched writing.

15. Vengeance

There’s a lot happening in this BJ Novack-written murder mystery about a shallow New York D-bag who learns down-home values in Texas when he launches a podcast about a murder victim he once casually hooked up with. When it’s sharp and witty, this is terrific, but when the murder is solved, all those hard-won values go out the window.

16. The Lost City

This is inspired by those “Romancing the Stone” movies and it’s great to see Sandra Bullock traipsing through the jungle. I can’t quite figure out why it’s not more fun, though. The movie only really comes to life when Brad Pitt shows up.

17. The Glass Onion

What a surprise — this “Knives Out” sequel is not as good as the low-budget original. Set on a Greek island, it’s more beautiful than the first one, while the murder was conceived, committed and solved in a large rambling house. Expanding and opening up the setting gives the director, Rian Johnson, more opportunity to be self-indulgent, and exposes Daniel Craig’s acting idiosyncrasies as vaguely absurd.

18. Weird

Everything about this mockumentary on Weird Al Yankovic’s life, starting with the casting of Daniel Radcliff as Weird Al, is hilarious in 15-minute bursts but it’s a lot to absorb over a full-length movie.

19. Bros

This was positioned as a ground-breaking “gay rom-com,” but what’s really innovative about this isn’t that the protagonist is gay but that he’s so neurotic, self-absorbed and unlikable. Bold choice! It’s undeniably funny and does have a conventional cisgendered pairing off, but the route to this happy ending was more than a little tortured.

20. Spiderman: No Way Home

This is another multiverse story with a clever premise: the Toby Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland Spidermen all live in different universes and and need to join forces to fight and evil nemesis. The movie is fine but I immediately forgot the plot the second I left the theatre.

21. The Menu

A celebrity chef with an insanely devoted staff goes a teensy bit off the rails as he seeks to avenge himself on his rich customers who don’t appreciate his artistry. The movie is beautiful and fascinating until it spins out of control. One thing it has going for it is that one of the protagonists — Anya Taylor-Joy — plays a character who hails from my hometown of Brockton Mass.

22. Triangle of Sadness

Another movie about the wretchedness of the top one percent (see “The Menu” above.) In this version, the obnoxious rich get their due when their luxury cruise ship sinks during a hurricane and various guests and crew are washed up on a deserted island. Status and power now reverts to those who can enhance survival and having been a male model doesn’t really cut it any more.

23. Sr.

Before there was Robert Downey Jr., there was Robert Downey Sr., a 1960s avant garde filmmaker (“Putney Swope” being his most famous film). Jr. commissions a documentary about dad so they can have a nice bonding experience. This is not a “warts and all” treatment but the film does make it clear that Jr.’s well-document drug problems almost certainly stem from Mom and Dad’s casual approach to drugs when he was growing up.

24. The Rose Maker

A French rose farmer on the verge of bankruptcy takes on three work release employees who know nothing about agriculture or roses but somehow manage to save the farm. Light and charming in that French way.

25. Come Back Anytime

If you’ve seen “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” this is the ramen version — a documentary about a small restaurant owner in Tokyo who wants to retire. WE come to understand the impact that will have on his regular customers, who consider the place their home away from home (like the “Cheers” bar or a Black barbershop). Given that being in community with other humans is a universal need (ranging from bowling leagues to QAnon message boards), it’s interesting to see how other cultures achieve that.

26. Elvis

This is not a good movie but somehow got a Best Picture Oscar nomination anyway. Go figure. “Elvis” is a PowerPoint version of Presley’s life; it hits the highlights, which seem accurate enough, but misses the complexity in between. Maybe the better analogy is “Elvis for Dummies.” It doesn’t help that the movie is narrated by Tom Hanks, in his worst role ever, as Col. Tom Parker. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the music isn’t very good, making it hard to understand what made Elvis so wildly popular.

27. To Olivia

Hugh Bonneville (aka “Lord Grantham”) portrays the children’s author Roald Dahl, who was a complicated figure. He’s married to the actress Patricia Neal and the movie covers the period in their life when they have to grapple with the sudden death of their daughter Olivia. Not all movies have to have happy, life-affirming endings, but this one essentially peters out.

28. The Pact

Karen Blixen, who was better known as the author Isak Dinesen, lives a life of lonely luxury back in post-war Denmark. She takes on an aspiring writer as a protege, and then, creepily, tries to take over his life.

29. Martin Eden

Based on Jack London’s semi-autobiographical novel about an ambitious working class schmoo who works his way into the high society that he despises. This is an extremely low-budget movie theoretically set in early 20th century Oakland but filmed on Nantucket (!!!!).

30. We Feed The World

A Ron Howard documentary about the super-chef Jose Andres and his non-profit World Central Kitchen, which rushes to disaster areas to feed people devastated by hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. The story itself is inspiring but the film itself inexplicably falls a little flat. Ultimately there’s no narrative — it’s like a long Sixty Minutes piece.

The Best TV of 2022

Well, it’s been another great year for television — unless you’re a corporate executive trying to make money on the hundreds, maybe thousands, of TV shows that were served to us this year. There are, after all, only so many eyeballs to go around so the profit margins are not what they used to be. I never thought I’d complain that there were too many good TV shows, but the overabundance is frustrating because not only are they spread out among a dozen streaming services, but even if I had the money to subscribe to them all, I’d never have the time to watch it all. Which is why there are highly praised shows missing on the list below.

This might have been the year that streaming fully conquered old-fashioned live TV. Out of the hundreds of episodes we watched last year, my wife and I only watched two “live,” in real time — the series finale of “Better Call Saul” and the season finale of “White Lotus.” And we only watched two shows that were broadcast on traditional network TV — “Abbott Elementary” (ABC) and “Saturday Night Live” (NBC).

The best trend of the year were intelligent shows that dove deep and unsparingly into the niche cultures of their creators — “Reservation Dogs,” “Letterkenny,” “South Side,” “Atlanta,” and “Derry Girls.” When you are making a show about your family, your friends, and yourself, it’s easy to poke fun while making broader social points.

The worst trend of the year was the staleness of once-fresh shows that hung on too long. Most of these were once-edgy series like “Killing Eve,” “Stranger Things” and “What We Do in the Shadows” that had nothing new to say after a while, relying instead on one improbable plot twist after another to extend the life of the series beyond its “sell-by” date. (I’m afraid this will eventually be the fate of “Succession,” which wasn’t on this year but which was verging on exhaustion at the end of its third season in 2021.) The great exception to this rule was “Better Call Saul,” which, from the beginning, had an end in sight and was able to plan the whole six-season arc in linear story-telling rather than relying on the back and forth dithering of a series that doesn’t know when the bosses will pull the plug.

Looking ahead to next year, the most exciting thing is that I have no idea what unheralded piece of content will fall out of the sky and amaze us, like “The Bear,” “The Old Man” and “Somebody Somewhere” did this year. And if that doesn’t happen, maybe I’ll finally start “Yellowstone.”

1. Reservation Dogs

This heartbreaking but subtly hilarious depiction of teenagers dealing with grief and the magical realism of growing up on an Indian reservation was actually better this year than last. There’s no self-pity on this show, just honesty about the universal hardship of being a teen anywhere and the specific problems of living in a subjugated culture that has nether fully embraced nor rejected mainstream American values.

2. Better Call Saul

A profoundly moral show, and a masterclass on how easy it is for a someone with a nominally good heart to “break bad” through years of irreversible small choices. Visually stunning in episode after episode, with sharp writing and the best TV performance in decade (from Rhea Seehorn), it was sometimes hard to watch knowing that we were eventually going to be offered up the death and destruction of characters we had come to care for. And, to be honest, it’s been hard to follow the plot over the years. Nevertheless, “Saul” turned out to be one of the great shows in TV history.

3. Letterkenny

The funniest and verbally filthiest show on television. This year we caught up on all ten seasons and absorbed many Canadian colloquialisms into our family language (“Pitter patter,” “That’s what I appreciates aboot you,” “degens” “figure it out!”) Letterkenny is a small town in the Canadian boonies where archetypes feud and literally fight with each other, but where the real damage is done through an onslaught of insulting, frequently sex-filled verbal puns. Weirdly, for all the drinking, fighting, carousing and swearing Letterkenny is also profoundly moral, with a strict sense of right and wrong.

4. The Chosen

I’ve watched a lot of dramatic productions of the Jesus story over the years but nothing as enthralling as this. It helps to know a little bit about the Bible because this series fills in the backstories of the major and minor figures we hear about in the Gospels, especially Simon Peter, Mary Magdalene, Matthew, Thomas, and Nicodemus. Importantly, the whole thing seems believable, especially the way Jesus is so human, displaying humor, self-awareness, kindness and wisdom. If you don’t know about this show you’re living in a bubble because it’s a national phenomenon.

5. White Lotus

A national phenomenon of an entirely different sort. (I have a feeling that the Venn Diagram of viewers who watched both “The Chosen” and “The White Lotus” is very narrow.) The second season of “The White Lotus” delivers all the satisfactions of the first, with an even juicier murder plot. It’s satisfying to know that the filthy rich, who can afford to spend a week at a place like this, are even more miserable than we are. The theme this year was sex — what people will do for it, what they’ll trade for it, and the costs of anything besides monogamous relations between married couples. One of the few shows we watched “live” this year.

6. Mythic Quest

Can I just point out that F. Murray Abraham, who won an Oscar in 1984 and then kind of disappeared for almost 40 years, has resurfaced to play surprisingly humorous parts in two hit TV series — “White Lotus” and “Mythic Quest”? The latter is an hilarious satire on a video game company run by the usual assortment of egomaniacs, incompetents, strivers, hangers-on and dreamers that populate corporate America on TV. And beneath the surface of those really funny jokes, the show is remarkably humane and insightful about human nature.

7. The Bear

I don’t know what an Italian Beef Sandwich was before, but after watching this show I’m dying to visit Chicago and have one. “The Bear” is an INTENSE inside look at the workings of a small family-owned restaurant. It’s so realistic that everyone I know who works in a restaurant can’t bear to watch it because of traumatic flashbacks. The latest in a long line of culinary dramas with food and chefs serving as metaphors for Art and Artist respectively. It’s a family drama, too, where the characters repress their feelings and dreams until they explode. I ate it up.

8. Welcome to Wrexham

There’s a lot of entrepreneurial genius in this show, which arrived in the aftermath of Ted Lasso but before the start of the World Cup. Rob McElhenney (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “Mythic Quest”) and Ryan Reynolds (“Green Lantern” and “The Proposal”) buy a down-on-their-luck soccer club in Wrexham, Wales and fund its improvements by selling this reality show/documentary to FX. There’s a lot here about what it means to be a sports fan, how a team can embody the heart of a community, and what it’s like to be a professional athlete, an owner, a long-suffering fan, or a general manager. After watching this series there’s nothing I want more in the world now than to attend a Wrexham match

9. Atlanta

“Atlanta” was the most ambitious and innovative series of the last six or seven years, mixing humor, pathos, surrealism and social commentary, sometimes with disconnected episodes that had nothing to do with the main characters, but everything to do with the Black experience in America. When it was good it was very very good but when it was bad it was horrid. Occasionally the experimentation with form and content seemed self-indulgent, but it was never less than thought-provoking. Donald Glover, the creator, is obviously some kind of genius, but he throws so many contradictory ideas on the screen that it’s hard to know what he really thinks beyond: “It’s complicated.”

10. Somebody Somewhere

A sweet and gentle look at a women who returns to her somewhat dysfunctional family in Small Town Nowhere following the death of her sister. Life is complicated, and not always what we wanted or expected, but we can get by with basic decency.

11. The Andy Warhol Diaries

This is a really great documentary about Andy Warhol. Excerpts from his diary are interspersed with interviews with people who knew him. In the end, this is not only a documentary about Warhol but also a fascinating look at the New York art and cultural scene during the sixties, seventies and eighties.

12. The Old Man

Like “The Bear,” “The Old Man” came out of nowhere on FX and gripped a certain class of TV watchers with its complex plot and open-wound drama. This is a show about a mythical CIA, a former agent, a deputy director, a daughter, an Afghan freedom fighter and a lot of killing. Initially gripping, it does go a bit off the rails at the end of the season with the convoluted twists and counter-twists, but it still ended up being seven episodes of gripping TV.

13. The Crown

I was initially put off by Imelda Staunton but quickly came to think she’s the best QEII yet. “The Crown” always has a juicy premise — purportedly exposing the inner workings of the British royal family. But I’d like it better if it didn’t depend quite so much on invented suppositional events, like, say, Charles’s fictitious scheme to depose his mummy. Although beautifully filmed as usual, this season was not as much fun because the Charles/Diana story is so sordid and tragic. (The major surprise is that boring old John Major is acknowledged as a very good PM?)

14. Winning Time

A very entertaining account of the rise of the Lakers and the NBA itself in the 1980s. This suffers more from made-it-up-itis than even “The Crown,” but it’s fun nevertheless, probably because it takes itself less seriously.

15. Derry Girls

“Derry Girls” is a teen comedy about adolescence in Northern Ireland during the “Troubles” in the 1980s. I didn’t think I wanted or needed to see another season, given that — way before COVID — Season 2 had ended so satisfactorily. And while all the characters have now aged out as believable teens, this season was genuinely funny and affecting.

16. Only Murders in the Building

An extremely light and fluffy show that’s mildly interesting and not very challenging but still a pleasant way to pass the time. I’ve already forgotten who committed the murder in the most recent season, but does that really matter? The real pleasure is watching Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez and the Upper West Side interact with each other.

17. Hacks

“Hacks” is another of those unheralded gems on HBO Max. with great performances by Jean Smart (“Designing Women”) as a hacky Las Vegas comedian in the Joan Rivers mode and Hannah Einbinder (aka Lorraine Newman’s daughter) as a down-and-out younger writer who thinks she’s too good to be churning out one-liners. You will not be surprised to learn that they each learn something from the other.

18. Stranger Things

The best moment of the TV season was the sequence featuring a Kate Bush song (“Running Up that Hill”) playing in the background as one of the characters literally hovered between this world and the next. The worst moment of the year occurred five minutes before the end of the final episode when it became clear that this season wasn’t going to be the final one after all. (I also enjoyed the Russians being portrayed as the bad guys, which those commies definitely were.) Going for another season is just a money grab by everyone concerned, given that the series has run out of ideas. Still, the action is exciting, although it does occasionally strain credibility, and being back in the 80’s is definitely fun.

19. Wednesday

As mash-up of “Stranger Things,” “Harry Potter,” “Twilight: and “Buffy The Vampire Slayer,” and based on the Adams Family’s sulky teen daughter. Wednesday is sent to an American Hogwarts knock-off, where she has to deal of the angsty teen emotions of her classmates, none of which she seems to experience herself. Normally, someone who can’t experience emotions is considered a psychopath, and sure enough Wednesday’s inability to trust is inadvertently responsible for the season’s high body count. But she does “grow” throughout the season so I guess it makes sense that she’s not the one sent to an institution in the final episode. The show is definitely fun, although I gather I am way too old to be in its target demographic.

20. South Side

“South Side,” about the antics of the South Side of Chicago, is flat out hilarious, with everyone on the make or the take. Aggressively anti-woke, “South Side” nevertheless treats its characters with respect. They have agency and real human emotions and motivations. I would rate this higher except there’s really no one to root for, making it hard to feel invested.

21. Abbott Elementary

“Abbott Elementary” is a throwback. Its a show on a real televisions network — ABC — that’s actually decent. The setting is a public elementary school in Philadelphia, with the young idealistic teachers pitted against the grizzled veterans. Warm and sweet and occasionally funny.

22. The Last Movie Stars

Ethan Hawke was hired to do a documentary about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward based on unpublished interviews that the great Star had made when planning to write a memoir. Although Newman subsequently destroyed the tapes, transcripts somehow emerged and Hawke hired actors to impersonate the voiceovers of the stars and their family and friends. The documentary is maybe a little long but nevertheless fascinating. It’s a warts-and-all portrayal of a famous couple who seemed to have a perfect marriage but definitely didn’t.

23. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Like “Stranger Things,” there’s no reason to expand this season for another year, but that’s where we ended up. It’s pleasant to watch, but the tics of these fast-talking wisecracking caricatures are starting to wear thin. Love the Sixties milieu, though.

24. Bridgerton

Beautiful mind candy. Just turn it on and look at all all the pretty characters and don’t think too hard about the plot. It’s not really that interesting, clever, or hard to figure out, but just good enough that you want to see how it resolves itself. And of course there’s all that sex.

25. Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy

Talk about food and travel porn! It’s almost painful to watch this show because the food looks so delicious and the locations so spectacular, that I feel sad knowing I’ll never experience either.

26. Killing Eve

Another series that lasted about a season too long. This was one of the most interesting and original series for a while, with great acting and a gripping premise, but the extremely convoluted plot eventually got tiresome and all the gruesomely graphic murders started to make me queasy.

27. Star Struck

I watched this series in January and had to look up what it was all about, which is this: a movie star unexpectedly falls in love when a very ordinary woman and no one can quite believe it. HER!!!??? The show is British, and consequently understated and reasonably witty. I remember liking it when I watched it but obviously it didn’t make a big impression.

28. We Are Lady Parts

Four young London-based Muslim women find solidarity by performing in a punk band while trying to fit into their own culture. The characters rang from devout to rebellious and as in most sitcoms, they are so different that they’d never be friends in real life. Despite the seemingly inventive premise, “Lady Parts” is really a traditional comedy with fairly obvious jokes and plot lines. A nice amusing show, but not deep.

29. What We Do In the Shadows

“What We Do In The Shadows,” has been one of the most hilarious and inventive shows over the past few years, featuring four clueless vampires living in a creepy house on Staten Island. But the schtick, which involves casual heartlessness about the way so many victims die, now seems tired and even sour. They should have quit after three seasons.

30. Saturday Night Live

Regrettably, a flat year. The cast lacks star power and do we still need so many skits about Donald Trump? You’d never know someone else was president. I’m sure Lorne Michaels is desperately holding onto the show so he can make it to the 50th anniversary in two years, but everything needs to be sharper and funnier if that’s going to happen.

The 2020 Movie List

Frances McDormand in the film NOMADLAND. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2020 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved

I think we can all agree that 2020 was the worst year in cinema that any of us can remember. The film industry, with its heavy emphasis on redundant and blockbustery comic book movies, was already headed into the toilet when the year began and the pandemic only drove the nail into the coffin. I deeply missed going to the theater for the big screen, in-person experience, but even the movies I saw at home tended to be disappointing. When, at the end of the year, I looked at the “top ten” lists from the major critics to see what I was missing, I saw that they had selected small, independent, depressing movies I’d never heard of. Watching someone else’ trauma didn’t really appeal to me this year, but what was the alternative? The usual mainstream movies with movie stars and well-known directors were absent, apparently being withheld by the studios until the pandemic is over and it’s safe to go to the movies again.

The last time I watched this few movies (and when I say “movies” I am including films that were or could have been released in a movie theatre but which I streamed at home) was more than 20 years ago when my son was too small to sit still for a full-length picture.

However, once the Oscar nominations came out I made a special effort to watch the Best Picture contenders and I’m glad I did because one of those small, independent depressing movies — “Nomandland” — turned out to be a masterpiece that salvaged the year after all, and many of the others were pretty good.

1. Nomadland

Every once in a while there’s a movie so original that you not only can’t predict where it’s going, you can’t even understand the parameters of HOW to predict where it’s going and need to just let it wash over you. Last year it was “Parasite” and a few years earlier it was “Boyhood.” I’ve never seen movie characters that seemed as real as they do in “Nomadland” and that’s because they actually are real-life modern nomads, who have chosen a deliberately rootless life, unencumbered from anything that will tie them down. Before I watched it, I thought this was a movie about the victims of capitalism but discovered it’s really about a certain kind of personal brokeness can only be salved by kindness, temporary community, and flight. The Frances McDormand character isn’t “houseless” because she has to be, but because she wants to be. Just like Huck Finn, Natty Bumpo and a dozen other characters in American literature and cinema before them. The director Chloe Zhao will probably win best director but I hope they don’t put her in the “identity” box as the first Asian woman to win because she’s much more than that. Although born in China, she’s a great AMERICAN director.

2. Soul

All year long I resisted subscribing to Disney+ out of principle but I finally plunked down seven dollars for a month’s subscription so I could watch “Soul.” If I hadn’t done that I probably wouldn’t have written a movie list at all because until then I didn’t have a legitimate Number One. “Soul” turned out to be a piece of art that literally changed the way I look at the world like nothing else has since I sat through “Our Town” for the first time — a work that expresses similar themes. I knew “Soul” was a Pixar movie about a guy who loved jazz but I didn’t understand until halfway through that the title referred to a person’s literal soul. Wrapped within a a very charming, funny, gorgeously presented, easy-to-digest animated movie is the answer to the profoundest question — how should you live your life? Here’s a hint — you should live you life by living it to the fullest.

3. Tigertail

I need to make it very plain that this movie is definitely NOT “Tiger King,” that uber-trashy Netflix series about big cats. “Tigertail” is a deeply affecting story about the personal choices made by a working class Taiwanese immigrant with conflicting dreams. This quickly becomes an allegory about the emotional price paid by generations of ambitious new Americans who sacrificed love, family and their own mental health to pursue an economically better life in the U.S. Beautiful filmed with understated acting.

4. Minari

Like “Tigertail” (see above) this is a the story of the Asian immigrant experience, except more optimistic. The family in “Minari” is not as damaged by broken dreams and although they face the usual setbacks (although not, surprisingly, any discrimination in their little Ozark town) there’s enough love to pull everyone through.

5. Judas and the Black Messiah

It’s one of those odd quirks of the year that two Oscar nominated movies — “Judas and the Black Messiah” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7” — both revolved around a related series of events from Chicago in 1969. “Judas” twists the facts a bit to make the cops and the FBI look even worse than they were, but it’s a David McCullough-quality history compared to “The Chicago 7,” which is a cartoon version of reality. “Judas” is about the betrayal of the charismatic Black Panther organiziser “Chairman” Fred Hampton, who was killed (or assassinated, as is claimed here) in a police raid. The filmmaking is compelling, story story is though-provoking, and the acting is superb.

6. Emma

We probably didn’t need another adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, but what a treat it was to have this one to entertain us in the early days of the pandemic. The title character is played by Any-Taylor Joy, who gained far more notoriety this year as the alcoholic chess whiz on “The Queen’s Gambit.” She was great, as was the entire cast except for Johnny Flynn, who lacked Mr. Knightly’s gravitas. Each generation gets the “Emma” it deserves and this one rightly focused more than others on the class distinctions among the characters. Very fun.

7. News of the World

I’m so sorry I didn’t get a chance to see this Tom Hanks western in the theatre because the cinematography of the wild west was just beautiful. I don’t know if this is a deliberate homage to “The Searchers” but it has some of the same plot points — young girl kidnapped by Indians who brutally massacred her family and then adopted her being returned to her kin. In a normal year this would have been a hit, but in 2020 it dropped into obscurity. Too bad.

8. 63 Up

The last movie we saw — in our beloved Avon Theatre — before in-person movie-going shut down for the pandemic. The “Up” series, which has followed the lives of a dozen British subjects as they aged from 7- to 63-years-old is the greatest documentary project of all time. This will probably be the last in the series (which has updated every seven years) because the director Michael Apted has died. Given that several of these people, who we’ve been watching grow older over decades, have also died, are dying, or are grieving other personal losses, this particular episode is unusually elegiac. I’d encourage anyone who cares about film to go back and watch the original “7Up” and then follow the updates one by one. It’s amazing to experience how a life really rolls out and how some people turn out exactly like you think they will and others surprise.

9. The Sound of Metal

What happens when a drummer with an addiction problem and nothing to live for except the love of his girlfriend-the-vocalist goes deaf? It’s not good. So many movies about damaged people this year! And yet all credit to our protagonist, who’s not really very smart but has a lot of courage as he addresses this challenge.

10. My Octopus Teacher

Certainly the dreamiest documentary of the year, about a man who makes friends with an octopus. I learned a lot about cephalopodas. The underwater filming, in an ecosystem I never even knew existed, is remarkable, as is the anthropomorphizing that occurs within this movie. I mean, can you really be “friends” with a mollusk? Still, the fact that this was made at all is astounding.

11. Mank

This is the movie I was most looking forward to this year: David Fincher’s account of how Herman Mankiewicz wrote the first draft of “Citizen Kane.” It’s told in lush black and white with a curlicue narrative, and since you can’t always tell what flashback you’re in as the movie unspools, it’s not that easy to follow. I loved the first half, with its scene-setting and depiction of old Hollywood, but the historical story goes way off the rails as Fincher tries to establish that Mankiewicz’ motivation for attacking William Randolph Hearst via the fictional Charles Foster Kane is somehow connected to California’s 1936 gubernatorial campaign. Huh??!! And then there’s the movie’s unpersuasive assumption that the “Citizen Kane” story and the Kane character were both conceived solely by Mankiewicz and not in collaboration with Orson Welles. It’s ironic that a movie about a near-perfect screenplay has, itself, such a messed up screenplay.

12. One Night in Miami

A play made into a movie with a lot of “Capital A” Acting. It’s a fictionalized look at the night when Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke all find themselves in a hotel room debating and soliloquizing about very big ideas. I generally don’t like film adaptations of plays but the subject is so fascinating and the acting so compelling that it generally held my interest.

13. The Truffle Hunters

A documentary about the elderly men in a northern Italian village who live to find and dig out truffles from the forest floor. Absolutely nothing happens but it’s nice to spend time with these charming old men, their florid Italian mannerisms and their cute dogs.

14. Da 5 Bloods

Spike Lee is a great director but he goes intermittently goes off the rails, Rambo-style, in this story about four Black Viet vets of varying disposition who return to ‘Nam to reminisce and resolve some unfinished business. It’s exciting and emotional, especially when you admire the performance of Chadwick Boseman, who has since died, but some of the plot twists are asking too much of us.

15. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Heartbreaking and intense, with great high-octane acting by the dying Chadwick Boseman and the very-much-alive Viola Davis. Unfortunately, this is essentially a filmed play, complete with stilted theatrical dialogue and long monologues. Watching this I finally admitted to my self that I’m a philistine who just doesn’t like dramatic plays, even by someone as talented as August Wilson. The music was great, though.

16. Let Them All Talk

This movie is a hot mess. Meryl Streep is a novelist who wants to reconnect with her two former best friends from college (now estranged, played by Diane Weist and Candace Bergen) by taking them on a trans-Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary. Oh and her nephew’s on board too. Also her book agent, who’s is secretly spying on her. And then there’s a fabulously prolific John Clancy-type author who admires her greatly. Some conflicts get solved; some don’t; nothing really makes sense but it’s fun to watch everybody experience luxury cruising.

17. The Bee Gees: How Deep in My Love

Watching this documentary is more than a guilty pleasure — its a look back at two decades (the 1960’s and ’70’s) of rapidly evolving pop music. It’s the kind of movie that tries to make you feel guilty for ever scorning the amazingly prolific Bee Gees and largely succeeds. Be warned, though, that if you don’t like disco it’s because you are either racist, homophobic, or both (this, in a movie about three of the whitest, straightest, most hirsute guys in the business).

18. The Trip to Spain

This is the third “Trip to” movie involving a couple of British comics who go on exotic trips, eat fantastic meals, do Sean Connery impersonations, and have at least one existential crisis. The formula is always enjoyable but is wearing thin now. I literally had to go back and read a recap to refresh my memory about what happened in this one.

19. Wonder Woman ’84

This actually wasn’t as bad as the critics said, but in a year when a lot of movies “didn’t make sense,” this was the most disappoining. I had admired the original “Wonder Woman” in 2017 and hoped the director Patty Jenkins would build on that ,but WW84 was a sad step back into Marvel-grade territory. As usual, the future of the planet is in doubt, this time because a Donald Trump-like businessman has a self-esteem problem. Gal Gadot is great, though. I enjoyed watching her, even in civilian clothes.

20. The Book Sellers

I have nothing against this documentary, which is a pleasant, genteel look at the rare book store business in New York City, but it’s a trifle dull and doesn’t deliver the “Wow” moment of a great documentary.

21. Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band

Another perfectly fine documentary about a marginally interesting subject — the band called “The Band.” This is not that different from the knock-off movies of other bands that you can watch on Amazon Prime and I only included it in the list because it was theatrically released and we paid to watch it during the first month of the pandemic.

22. The Trial of the Chicago 7

With a paint-by-numbers screenplay that sets out to hit all the usual beats and frame the action around the usual dramatic opposing protagonists, this Aaron Sorkin travesty reduces one of the most climatic and bizarre events of the 1960s to a banal, Hollywood-ized conventional movie. It’s possible that if you never heard of the Chicago Seven, who were on trial for causing a riot during the 1968 Democratic Convention, you might find some of this plausible but almost every dramatic high point was concocted so that Sorkin can reach a couple of simple conclusions. No complexity allowed here. And are we seriously to believe that this wimpy Tom Hayden will go on to entrance and marry Jane Fonda?

23. The Prom

If you ever watched Ryan Murphey’s “Glee,” you can’t be surprised by the massively uneven way his full-length movies turn out. “The Prom” has an interesting premise. Four Broadway stars — Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Rannells — cynically try to rehabilitate their careers by cynically taking up the cause of a high school lesbian in Indiana denied admission to her prom. You’l never guess what happens! Oh wait, you will. As in “Glee” there are some genuinely affecting moments, but they are buried beneath strata of cliches, absurdity, and blatant emotional manipulation.

24. Cats

I hate to pile on, but this really was terrible. I never saw “Cats” in the theatre or or even listened to the soundtrack before but didn’t realize that, except for “Memories,” the score is actually pretty bad. And that’s just the first problem. The plot is apparently about alley cats competing to see which of them will win the chance to — it’s a chance to die, right? I literally cannot explain how this Broadway musical became such a musical sensation.

Ten Albums That I Can’t Forget

There’s a Facebook challenge going around where people post photos of their ten favorite albums “without explanation.”  No one challenged me to do this, which is just as well because I definitely need to explain.  Because instead of selecting “favorite” albums, I’m more interested in the most meaningful — the ones that remind me of who I was.  These all create aural Proustian moments — except that it’s not the taste of a madeleine that sends me back in time, it’s a song.

Considering how rare it’s been to buy a CD, never mind an LP, for the last 15 year, it’s not surprising that these albums are front-loaded toward decades past.  But if truth be told, the real reason this music is weighted toward the old days is that music is more important and meaningful to you when you’re younger.  With that as an apologia, here are the ten albums that I just can’t forget.

1. Oklahoma!

I was about five years old when our family moved into our little ranch house in Brockton, Mass.  My parents were young and didn’t have a lot of money but they did buy a hi-fi and a handful of albums — almost all Broadway musicals or movie soundtracks.   I still love all those old albums (in fact my wife thinks I have an unnatural interest in show tunes) but the one that really brings me back is the first one they bought — Oklahoma.

Even now I know the lyrics to most of the songs — but now I actually understand them (I’m thinking of you, “I Cain’t Say No”).  But the most evocative song for me remains “People Will Say We’re In Love,” which is the best flirting song ever written.

2. Please Please Me

Other generations must get tired of hearing Boomers talk about the Beatles, but they loomed so large for so long that we just can’t get over it.  The Beatles burst upon the scene when I was ten years old and my mother took me down to the old Coats Field department store in Brockton to buy what would become my first record album.

The Capitol Records version of this is officially titled The Early Beatles, but the version I have was released by JayVee Records (multiple companies had rights to these songs because no major American label wanted to sign them and they originally ended up signing with the fly-by-night JayVee.  For more detail on the tangled history of this album click here.)

This is my battered LP, VeeJay version

This is hardly the best best Beatles album. There’s even a cover of a song from the Broadway musical “The Music Man” (“Til There Was You”).  Most of the original Beatles songs aren’t really top notch either, but “I Saw Her Standing There,” “There’s a Place,” and especially, “Please Please Me” still exemplify the energy and fun of being a young Beatles fan.

3. Jesus Christ Superstar

When I was in the 11th grade, Jesus Christ Superstar hit our school like a bomb.  Tommy might have been the first “rock opera,” but this was the second and no one had ever heard anything like it.  What I never expected then was that Andrew Lloyd Weber would abandon rock and go on to transform musical theater, but for at this moment he seemed like a very cutting edge composer.

Some kids in my English class wrote a short play based on the album called “J.C.” (the 20-minute performance involved us acting out some scenes with the music playing in the background).  Throughout the day, over multiple periods, we performed this little one-act to packed crowds in our “Little Theater.”  And then later that summer, a dozen of us drove into Boston to see a concert version of album performed in Boston Garden (yes, those were the days when parents would let six 17-year-olds cram into the family car and drive on the Southeast Expressway without seat belts.)  King Herod’s song brought down the house as it always does.

I’d like to think I imbued some religious feeling from the album but I can see now that very little Christianity is expressed in the album.  And when it was turned into a movie a couple of years later, it all seemed vaguely ridiculous.  That movie actually turned me against the album.  A couple of years ago I played the LP for the first time in decades and actively disliked it.  The songs themselves are fine but the way they’re performed, with screeching strings, vibrated differently with me as an adult than as a teen. Worse, several of the songs became ear worms and I couldn’t get them out of my head for weeks, so not only did I not like them, but I couldn’t forget them.   I didn’t even watch the John Legend version when it was on TV last Easter.  Sigh — it’s tough to get old.

One song I still do like, though, is “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”

4. All Things Must Pass

In contrast with “Jesus Christ Superstar,” I love George Harrison’s first solo album even more now than I did when it came out.  I received it as a gift from my high school girlfriend on Christmas 1970 and whenever I play it, I can smell her patchouli oil perfume, taste the food in our high school cafeteria, and remember what it was like to drive around in that old junker of mine.

More important, the songs are still fantastic.  What I can’t understand is how George wrote such deeply spiritual music at age 27 — the age my son is now!  I not only still have my original boxed set LP but also the CD, and whenever I drive by myself on a long trip, this is always in the mix of CDs I play.

5. No Secrets

To the extent I have a guilty pleasure it’s Carly Simon.  I know the music is not top quality, with simplistic lyrics and pretty cliched tunes, and yet I bought her first ten albums and still love them all.  No Secrets is the album that came out the year I was a freshman in college.  “You’re so Vain” was the biggest hit but the title song is the one that most recaptures the feeling of being away at school, even though I had barely any secrets to keep.

6. Court and Spark

My college-era girlfriend had been a serious Joni Mitchell fan and I thought she was as pretentious as they came (Joni, not the girlfriend).  My friend Jim was also a Joni fan, which I scoffed at, until he brought me into his dorm room and made me listen to her newest album Court and Spark, which was more musically accessible than the earlier work.  I still remember sitting there hearing “People’s Parties” and changing my mind on the spot.  But my favorite song from the album is “Help Me,” a plea from a woman who is sinking into love and can’t escape.  Man I still love that song.

This album turned me into a huge Joni Mitchell devotee.  I even went back and reconsidered her earlier albums, all of which I now love.  But Court and Spark was the turning point.

7. Stop Making Sense

I saw the Jonathan Demme movie “Stop Making Sense” before I even heard the album and couldn’t figure out what exactly was going on, with The Talking Heads’ David Byrne singing a series of increasingly frantic and despairing songs as his suit got bigger and bigger.   Eventually I bought the album and learned to love the existential dread of “Psycho Killer,” “Burning Down the House” and, especially, “Once in a Lifetime.”  What did I have to despair about?  I was 30, living an exciting life in Washington DC, and reasonably happy. It wasn’t exactly in despair I felt but the question at the core of the album did resonate: “And you may ask yourself/well, how did I get here?”  That’s a question that never goes away.  Twenty years ago I wouldn’t have put this album on the list but it’s been haunting me to long enough to warrant being rated one of albums I can’t forget.

8. Born in the USA

When I was working on Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984, there was a guy in the research department who was a Bruce Springsteen fanatic.  Born in the USA had just come out and he was such a proselytizer that he recorded it for me on a cassette tape.   I never actually listened to that tape but eventually bought my own LP — my real introduction to Springsteen.  And of course the song “Born in the USA” eventually became the unofficial anthem of the Reagan/Bush 84 campaign until Springsteen himself told us to stop playing it at rallies.

This album is a good example of how an artist can lose control of the narrative for his own art.  Most of the songs are supposed to be about the dissolution of the American dream, what with working class guys losing their jobs etc., and yet the album largely comes off as a celebration of America.  The song “Dancing in the Dark” has bleak, lonely, depressing lyrics but the tune is so upbeat that the effect is actually positive.  And the title tune, which is supposed to be a devastating indictment of American society ended up sounded patriotic because of that strong, repetitive chorus. “Born in the USA, I was Born in the USA.”

9. Graceland

Aside from being a great album with innovative music, Graceland is on this list for two reasons: 1) Soon after my wife and I were married and living in a thin-walled New York apartment, the tenant next door to us broke up with his boyfriend and played it until about 2:00 a.m. one night.  Consequently this album always reminds me of those early days in NYC when we were trying to figure out married life.

2) About four years later, when my son was a year and a half old, we moved to Connecticut.  Until we filled the living and dining rooms with furniture, I used to pick him up and dance with him from one end of the house to another to the tune of “You Can Call Me Al.”

And of course the music was unlike anything I’d ever heard before — all those South African musicians being introduced to American audiences.

10. Running With Scissors

My wife and I always agreed that humor provides you with emotional resilience, exercises your brain and helps you make sense of an increasingly absurd world.  To that end we exposed our son to a variety of comedians and comedy shows, including “The Simpsons,” “Seinfeld” “The Office”, “Letterman,” etc.  Eventually he started to introduce us to comedians he’d found on his own, including Weird Al Yankovic.  Soon the house was full of Weird Al CDs, the best of which, by far, was “Running With Scissors.”  In addition to the the usual parodies of hit songs, this album has two masterpieces.

The first is “The Saga Begins,” a spoof of the second round of Star Wars movies to the tune of “Bye Bye Miss American Pie.”  The lyrics summarize the intricate and, frankly, ridiculous plot of “A Phantom Menace.”  Sample: “We took a bongo from the scene/ And we went to Theed to see the Queen/ We all wound up on Tatooine/ That’s where we found this boy…” The juxtaposition of the nerdy “Star Wars” detail with the great “American Pie” tune is what makes this song achieve greatness.

The second masterpiece on this album is “Albuquerque.” Unlike most other Weird Al songs, this is not a song parody but a absurdist story about a guy whose wildest dream is to visit the city of Albuquerque.  This is a long meandering story — what is know in literature as a picaresque, in the manner of “Candide” or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” It’s just one damn thing after another for the narrator.

In any event, my wife, son and I all found the song both hilarious and a bonding experience.  I tried to share it with some people outside the family and they just didn’t get it.  Didn’t think it was funny and gave me a strange look after I played it.  Well, at least there’s three of us who appreciate it.

 

Special bonus song

I’ve leave you with one more meaningful song, as long as we’re discussing the idiosyncrasies of humor.  This one isn’t even on an album.  When my son was on the college tour, one place we looked was Middlebury, my own alma mater.  We learned that some students had just produced a music video parodying the students body.  The video spoofs the various “Midd Kidds” at the college: the Library Queen, the Lax Bro, the Quidditch nerds, the flannel-shirted granola guy.  The video is full of inside jokes, but even an outsider can enjoy the humor because the college stereotypes are universal.

The video itself is hardly an advertisement for Middlebury or any liberal arts college, but it actually achieves a level of art as it illustrates how college is about taking on new identities, posing with them for a while, and then trying on something else.  Colleges would have you think that the education revolves around the classroom but in reality, college is about figuring out who you are — even if that takes means appropriating some obnoxious personalities for a while.

My son ended up going to Middlebury but avoiding all the stereotypes in the video (thank God).  Still, of all the songs that came out when he was in college, this is the one that most reminds me of those four very emotional transitional years.

The 2017 Movie List

Bye bye 2017.  It wasn’t a great year for cinema — although it did produce one great movie (“Dunkirk”) and six or seven highly original ones.

It’s no surprise that most of the movies I saw movies fall into two categories — blockbusters or arty independent films.  That’s basically where the creative action is these days.  Everyone in Hollywood is either aiming to gross $500 million or win an Oscar, with not a lot in between.  This makings rankings a little silly.  How are you supposed to decide whether “Lady Bird” is better than “Wonder Woman”?  They both have female directors and female protagonists trying to separate from their mothers.  The only difference is $450 million in ticket sales.

What’s a little surprising is how many of these movies — almost half — are based on true stories, including two that climax with Churchill’s “We will fight them on the beaches” speech.  I guess all the original storytellers have moved to Netflix.

I’m a little sad that I only saw 25 movies this year — it’s not like I’m giving up on the big screen, but week after week would go by with nothing interesting to watch — and some of the really arty stuff came and went so fast I missed it completely and had to catch up in the winter of 2018.  With that in mind, here’s my list.

1. Dunkirk

The most politically incorrect movie of the year.  The entire cast is composed of straight white men, for God’s sake!  The rescue of the surrounded British army from the beaches of Dunkirk by a flotilla of small pleasure craft is one of the great stories of World War II and Christopher Nolan has turned it into one of the most spectacular art films of all time, with minimal dialogue and a conflation of three different time sequences.  It’s epic, it’s thrilling and it’s going nowhere at the Oscars.

2. Lady Bird

Greta Gerwig’s semi-autobiographical account of her high school years in Sacramento is both very specific to its time and class, and universal to everyone who’s ever gone to high school and wanted something more.  The main character (played by the actress with the unpronounceable Irish name who starred in “Brooklyn”) struggles to be special and transcend her extremely middle-class background through various misadventures of senior year.  Everything seems to be on the line — and it is, for a girl who wants to get away from her hometown.

3. The Florida Project

This is the “Moonlight” of 2018 — an unsparing and unapologetic look at poverty and its consequences. A down-at-the-heels motel in the shadow of Disney World is the the last stop for poor families trying to keep their heads above water.  The kids run wild and what initially seems like a charming story of plucky sick-year-olds slowly spirals into a nightmare.  When the movie is over you can only sit and gape at the credits.

4 . Phantom Thread

Mesmerizing and seductive account of a fashion designer who demands total control but meets his match in a Danish (?) waitress. Paul Thomas Anderson layers on music, color, fabric and cinematography to make this the most sensual movie of the year.

5. Get Out

Is this a direct attack on the Trump era’s approach to race or a remarkably well-made horror movie in the style of “Rosemary’s Baby”?  I’ll leave the politics to others but it is definitely a fun thriller in which the villains are white liberals.  Jordan Peale deservedly made a ton of money on this tale of a black dude who hooks up with someone out of a “Girls” episode (literally, it’s Allison Williams who plays Marnie) and ends up in trouble when he goes home to meet her parents.  The rising level of creepiness and dawning awareness of what’s happening is masterful. (Fun fact — Jordan Peale is himself married to a white woman — the comedian Chelsea Peretti.  I bet Thanksgiving with the in-laws was fun after this movie came out.)

6. Wonder Women

A terrific superhero movie — maybe the best of all time — because it’s intelligent, wry and to scale (at least until the final 15-minute battle with Ares, the evil god of war).  Gal Godot is the perfect Wonder Woman — as sexy as they come and playing the role straight.  The political commentary on the fact that the movie had a woman director almost ruined my fondness for the film (see more of my commentary here), but not entirely.

7. The Last Jedi

The most beautiful and best-acted Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi suffers from mid-trilogy syndrome.  It’s obviously a bridge to get from the intro film to the finale, with a lot of extraneous filler and a huge body count.  A lot of the plot doesn’t make sense, but the characters are well-drawn and appealing.  Can’t wait for the next one!

8. Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 2

A really fun space movie with enough emotional beats to keep you caring.  Who would have guessed that the schlumpy loser boyfriend on “Parks and Recreation” would become a major movie star?

9. The Post

Meryl Streep plays Katharine Graham and Tom Hanks is Ben Bradlee.  Very good impersonations.  Kind of an old fashioned biopic about Big Ideas.  Well-made and thoughtful like most Spielberg films. I have to agree with everyone else, though, that it was weird to make a movie about the Pentagon Papers and focus on The Washington Post rather than the NYT.  I can’t help but feel that this was the case because Spielberg wanted to kill two birds with one stone: defend the press AND have a female protagonist. (Also, of all the movies based on real stories this year, I think this one department most egregiously from the facts.)

10. The Big Sick

The real life (-ish) story of how the Pakistani-American comedian Kumail Nanjiani met his future wife and stood by her while she was in a coma.  It’s funny, sweet and touching.  Probably the best coma movie since Sandra Bullock’s “While You Were Sleeping.”

11. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

The character played by Frances MacDormand is maddened with fury and grief that the killer of her raped and murdered daughter has not been found and seeks to publicly shame the local sheriff.  It’s not as depressing as it sounds!  Emotionally-compelling and well-crafted until about 2/3rds of the way through when it completely goes off the rails.  Not sure what Peter Dinklage is doing in this movie.

12. All The Money In The World

An incredibly tense dramatization of the kidnapping of 16-year-old Paul Getty in 1973.  I’d have been having a heart attack if I didn’t know how it turned out in real life.  This is the movie in which completed scenes by Kevin Spacey were reshot with Christopher Plummer after those unfortunate revelations of sexual misconduct were exposed last fall.  Plummer was great, so — good job!

13. A Ghost Story

Did anyone besides me actually see this?  Casey Affleck dies and comes back to haunt the house he lived in with his girlfriend Rooney Mara.  He’s wearing a sheet, which sounds silly but absolutely isn’t.  There’s hardly any dialogue because ghosts don’t talk.  Still, very profound.

14. Frantz

Another obscurity and my one foreign film this year.  A mysterious Frenchman shows up at the grave of a German World War I soldier with whom he has a special connection and the dead man’s family and fiancee want to know what’s going on.  Many lies are told to soften the horror of the war and in the end, life does go on, sort of.

15. Hidden Figures

This movie should have been on last year’s list but was not available for screening when I published last year.  Very mainstream entertainment about the genius black women who helped launch the space program through their jobs as human computers.  Not particularly complex but the good gals win and it’s very satisfying.

16. Baby Driver

This is a lot of fun if you like car chases and pop music.  The title character is a superhuman get-away car driver with daddy issues.  Kevin Spacey plays the local crime lord but because the movie came out before those unfortunate revelations his scenes were NOT reshot by Christopher Plummer.

17. Patriots Day

A good recap of the police investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing.  Mark Wahlberg is the “everyman” stand-in who is miraculously at the site of every major break in the case.  Kudos to the cops who caught these terrorists.  It’s amazing to see how they were able to capture these guys so fast.  Talk about gripping.

18. American Made

Tom Cruise was born to play this role — the good old boy hot shot pilot who gets recruited by the CIA to smuggle arms to the Contras during the eighties.  Based on true events, which I confirmed on wikipedia.  Cruise is one of those guys who can’t be bound by everyday conventions and is addicted to danger.  BTW, Cruise plays someone who’s about 35 and he looks it.

19. The Shape of Water

I’m not being contrary.  I honestly don’t get what people see in this movie.  To me it was dull and cliched — is there anything more predictable than an allegory about the repressiveness of the early 1960s?  I appreciate the originality but I was completely unmoved by the core love story.

20. The Disaster Artist

I was totally unaware that “The Room” even existed or that it was considered to be the worst movie of all time until this James Franco dramatization.  If you are unfamiliar with the story, watch a few YouTube clips of the original movie because you will never believe that such a weird thing ever happened.

21. Darkest Hour

This is a decent counterpoint to “Dunkirk,” depicting as it does the political machinations in the British government while their army was being driven by the Nazis to the Dunkirk beaches.  Gary Oldham is very good as Churchill, but the movie feels claustrophobic with all those cabinet meetings.   And the invented scenes (like Churchill in the subway) really strain credibility.

22. The Lost City of Z

The last of the “based on a true story” movies I saw this year, this one is about an explorer searching for riches in the Amazon during the early 20th Century.  The movie has some things to say about colonialism, dream-seeking, racism, ambition and obsession, but everything proceeds with a stateliness that borders on boring.

23. Spider-Man: Homecoming

Cute but inconsequential retelling (again!!!!) of the Spider-Man origin story.  Tom Holland is winning as the teenage Spidey but I strained to care.

24. Thor Ragnarok

I am not a fan of the Marvel universe, having grown up as a DC Comics kid, but I’d heard this was funny.  And it was funny and jokey in the same way that “Guardians of the Galaxy” is.  But I could not have cared less about the fate of Thor or any of his dysfunctional family.  I was so bored I actually walked out half-war through.

25. The Batman Lego Movie

I loved the original “Lego Movie” but making a super-depressed depressed Batman into a superhero Lego protagonist throws away almost all of the joy from the first movie.  Like “Thor Ragnorok,” this isn’t exactly a bad movie — I just don’t care for the snarky superhero genre where nothing seems to be at stake.

The 2016 Movie List

The older I get the more out-of-step I feel with the film industry.  In a year of kiddie animation and cinematic super heroes, I saw only two of the year’s top twenty grossing movies and most of the movies I did see were at independent art houses.  It was never my intention to be at odds with popular taste but it does seem that the movie business is primarily focused on audiences who are not old enough to vote. Consequently, there were months and months when there was nothing worth going to see, followed by a crazy rush to catch everything good in December.

Of course there were a few decent mainstream “adult” movies that were aimed at a general audience but most of them fell immediately out of circulation.  Maybe adults have gotten so out of the habit of going to the movies that they no longer bother.  In any event, 2016 was a pretty disappointing year.  Here’s what I saw, ranked from best to worst.

l. Moonlight

A beautiful and mesmerizing story of a poor, sensitive, black, gay kid named Chiron growing up in the Miami projects.    This feels like something you’ve never seen before, not only because of the unsparing depiction of life among the desperately poor but because of cinematography choices that seem almost documentary-style, with a lingering camera and a lack of narrative dialogue. The story is told in three stages of Chiron’s life, depicted by three actors ranging in age from youth to teen to adult.  After two years of #OscarSoWhite, this once had a good chance to win the Academy Award and it still deserves to.

2. Manchester By The Sea

This is as bleak, unsparing, and visually arresting as “Moonlight,” but without any attempt to pretty-up a tragedy with a hint of a happy ending.  Every time you think this movie’s going to give us a conventional feel-good twist it pulls back.  To that end, it feels more like real life than anything I’ve seen in a long time.  You feel like this is exactly what would happen when an already grieving uncle returns to his hometown after his brother’s death and is unexpectedly informed that he’s to be his nephew’s guardian.  Life will go on, but it will be a struggle.

3.  La La Land

Yet another startlingly original movie — a musical set in contemporary LA.  Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are barely adequate singers and dancers but you don’t really care because the cinematography is so luscious.  But don’t expect a feel-good experience.  In the end this is an exploration of art, ambition and love. You can succeed at two of those things but not all three.

4. Rogue One

Boy I was surprised that this was as good as it was — a very worthy addition to the Star Wars canon. It’s about the most perfect prequel ever, ending exactly at the moment when the original Star Wars movie (now called “A New Hope”) begins.  The story is a little confusing but not impossible to follow, for once.   The absence of Jedi mumbo jumbo is a relief too — it’s just straight action.

5. Everybody Wants Some

Finally, an intelligent feel-good movie.  Richard Linklater’s homage to his college baseball career, seen through the prism of a freshman jock’s first weekend on campus.  He checks into the baseball team house, meets his crazy teammates, has escapades and meets a nice girl.  Very funny, textured and warm. If only my freshman year had been like this.

6. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

I seem to be one of the few people who loved this movie.  Ostensibly a comedy starring Tina Fey and Billy Bob Thorton about a neophyte journalist embedded in Afghanistan, it’s also an eye-opening account of what our troops are experiencing over there.

7. Arrival

In a year of depressing movies, this one ranks way up there.  Amy Adams is a sad linguist who is called on to translate messages from aliens who have materialized at various locations around the world.  A quasi-intellectual film featuring hard thinking on linguistics and time traveling.

8. Hell or High Water

Jeff Bridges has come a long way since “The Last Picture Show” but he’s still wandering the wilds of small town Texas.  He’s after a couple of bank robbers who are trying to accumulate enough cash to pay off their predatory mortgage.  Again with the bleak world view!  Funny bantering, though, and some serious disquisitions on how to live your life when fate and society seem stacked against you.

9. The Edge of Seventeen

Seventeen-year-old Nadine has been (wait for it) depressed since her father died four years ago.  Wallowing in her own grief, she loses it when her best friend starts dating her brother.  Woody Harrelson is her cynical history teacher whose complete indifference actually increases his attractiveness as a life-adviser.

10. Captain Fantastic

A family of survivalists goes on a road trip to attend their mother’s funeral, with the usual conflicts between the all-modern and all-natural lifestyles.  Their brilliant but didactic father (Viggo Mortensen) is an intellectual bully who has tried to create a new Eden in the woods but is just this side of crazy.

11. Hail Caesar

The Coen Brothers make a pretty funny but not very weighty spoof of Hollywood in the 1950s.  The plot revolved around a studio fixer named Eddie Mannix (a real person btw) who’s trying to decide whether to take a legitimate job outside the business.  Basically everyone in the movie is a moron, which is funny as far as it goes.

12. The Nice Guys

Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are incompetent detectives in 1970’s LA.  The movie is hilarious until it turns into a convoluted story of conspiracy involving smog and catalytic converters (I’m not kidding).    If you took the first half of The Big Lebowski and combined it with the second half of Chinatown you’d have this movie.

13. Weiner

A behind the scenes and very candid look at Anthony Weiner’s mayoral campaign.  It’s only fitting that this narcissist would trip up the 2016 campaign.  Why kind of man would expose his wife to the prying eyes of a documentary when he knows he’s been sexting with women under the nom-de-plume Carlos Danger?  This is your classic train wreck from which you cannot avert your eyes.

14. Love and Friendship

Who knew there were Jane Austen novels yet to be mined by movie-makers?  Love and Friendship is based on the unpublished novel “Lady Susan,” written when Austen was still a teenager.  Hilarious and deeply cynical about the way the sexes manipulate each other, the movie is populated with dupes, rogues, brazen adulteresses, wide-eyed innocents and even a few honest gentlemen.  Fun.

15. Sully

Sully’s plane goes up, hits some geese and miraculously goes down on the Hudson River with no loss of life.  You may have heard the story.  Clint Eastwood does an admirable job of expanding the narrative of this five-minute flight into a two-hour movie, screwing around a little bit with the truth of the post-crash investigation.  Oh well, it’s only a movie.  Tom Hanks is the only actor who could have played Sully.

16. Eight Days a Week

A documentary about the touring history of the Beatles.  This is well-covered ground but as amazing as ever.

17. Fantastic Beasts

Perfectly serviceable Harry Potter prequel that I might have liked better if I could understand more than half the dialogue.  The film-making is imaginative but I had trouble caring a lot about the main characters.

18. Sausage Party

An atheist allegory in which processed food items worship humans as gods, not knowing that their ultimate resting place is in someone’s digestive track.  This bleak message is supposed to be made more palatable by the extreme coarseness of the animated food characters.  And it is funny to see food sex.  This is not a movie to which you would bring your confirmation class.

19. Absolutely Fabulous (The Movie)

Loved the TV show in the 90s.  Very hilarious.  And the movie is fun too for a while, but it’s hard to maintain that antic quality over a full-length feature.

20. Cafe Society

Late stage Woody Allen. This is a lot like La La Land without the songs, dances, handsome lead actor and brilliant cinematography.  An ambitious young man and an ambitious young woman fall in love in 1940s Hollywood and face the usual complications.  The movie is well-enough made but you feel that Woody Allen has explored all these themes already. (By the way, I saw 24 movies last year and four of them were set in Hollywood.)

21. Ghostbusters

The most ridiculous controversy of the year was the eruption over whether redoing Ghostbusters with a female cast defamed the spirit of the original movie.  So then the female movie critics got on their high horse and said it was better than it really was, and the sexist pigs said it was worse than it was, when in reality it was just kind of meh.  Let’s face it, the original wasn’t that great to begin with. This was not an all-female remake of Citizen Kane.

22. Magnificent Seven

Another unnecessary remake.  It was fine.  Your average western.  Can’t remember much about it now.

23. The BFG

Steven Spielberg and Raul Dahl make a very strange pairing, although they’re both obsessed with childhood.  A little orphan girl gets abducted by a lonely giant and gives meaning and purpose to said giant’s life.  Technically beautiful and even charming, but a little languorous.

24. Office Christmas Party

This had a dynamite cast (Jason Bateman, Jennifer Anniston, T.J. Miller, Kate McKinnon, etc.) and a crazy antic quality, but it never lifted off to the realm of pure comedic genius.  Nice try, though.

The Songs of 1968

Was 1968 the greatest year in popular music? To me that seems self-evident, unless you want to claim 1967. Or maybe 1969.

OK, so I was 14 years old at the time and it is well-known that the most meaningful music in your life is the music that was popular when you were in adolescence and beginning to have a sexual awakening. But it wasn’t my hormones that made 1968 such a great year – it was the music itself.

At least that’s what I thought until I listened to a Slate.com podcast featuring music historian Chris Molanphy, who pointed out that many of the top songs from 1968 were little more than schlock or elevator music. In other words, for every fantastic Number One like Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” there was a dog like Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey.”

Molaphy’s theory is that music served as a refuge because 1968 was such a horrible year politically (assassinations, riots, war, etc.). Therefore some of the year’s most popular songs were mindless diversions from the evening news. Maybe that’s the reason, or maybe the truth is that every year is full of schlock and it takes a couple decades to realize it. Looking at the full list of top hits in 1968, though, it seems that about half the songs aimed to change society through social commentary that you’d never find in pop music today so I’m not sure how escapist it was.

In any event, here are ten interesting nuggets I learned from Molanphy or my own observations about the top hits of 1968.

1. “Hey Jude,” one of the all-time great songs, is still the longest single ever to top Billboard’s pop charts. It was also the Beatles song that stayed longest at Number One (nine weeks). At seven minutes and 11 seconds, it was twice as long as most pop hits, and every radio station played the whole thing. Even more unprecedented, the Beatles ended the song with a four-minute chant, giving pop music a rare sense of mysticism. I will never forget watching the “Hey Jude” clip (below) that appeared on The Smothers Brothers in October 1968. In retrospect, that moment, even more than Woodstock, was the high point of the feel-good “flower power” movement.

2. Another really great hit from 1968 was Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” a fragment of which had appeared in Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate” the year before. Paul Simon hadn’t finished the song when the movie premiered and it wasn’t released until the  next summer. The song was initially titled “Mrs. Roosevelt,” but when Simon showed it to Nichols the director convinced him to change it the name of the seductress in the movie. The famous line if the song, “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?” was originally intended to refer to Simon’s boyhood hero Mickey Mantle but the syllables didn’t match up. In a song so deeply contemptuous of 1960’s America it was probably better anyway to refer back longingly to DiMaggio’s generation.

3. There were two instrumental Number One hits in 1968, both by international artists. First we had “Love Is Blue” by the French composer Paul Mauriat, who remains to this day the only French artist to have a chart-topping Billboard hit. The song was composed – with lyrics – for the Eurovision contest (as Luxemburg’s entry.) It didn’t win at Eurovision but became a huge hit in the U.S. Molanphy dismisses this song as the greatest piece of elevator music ever composed, but I have to admit that I owned this record and played it constantly.

4.  The other major instrumental hit of 1968 was “Grazing in the Grass” by the South African musician “Hugh Masekela.” Of course I’ve heard this song a million times; it arguably invented the smooth jazz genre. But I never knew the music was from South Africa. Partly that’s because The Friends of Distinction added words and released their own hit single, which is now better known than the original. (And “Love is Blue” and “Grazing in the Grass” weren’t the only instrumental hits that year – only the two number one hits. Other notable instrumental songs from 1968 include “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” and my favorite, “Classical Gas” by Mason Williams. I can’t remember any instrumental hits in the 21st Century.)

5.  Another Number One hit that might as well have been an instrumental recording was “Tighten Up” by Archie Bell and the Drells. This is a proto-Funk record in which Bell directs the band and the dancers on how to perform a dance called The Tighten Up. The remarkable thing about this song is that Drell had been drafted into the army and was recuperating in a German hospital from wounds suffered in Vietnam when the song hit Number One.

7. And then there’s Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass, a hugely popular instrumental band that had 17 Top 100 hits before they finally charted a Number One song with “This Guy’s in Love With You.” To demonstrate the oddity of 1968, this song was NOT an instrumental record. Nope, the band’s first Number One hit was vocalized by Herb Albert himself. Originally inserted as a knock-off number in a CBS TV special, the song so charmed viewers that it was rushed out as a single. And not only was this the first Number One hit for Herb Albert, it was the first Number One song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Go figure.

8. Molanphy reserves his greatest scorn for Bobby Goldsboro’s weeper “Honey,” about a husband mourning his dead wife. He claims that it is considered by many to be the worst Number One song ever, although I’m sure the competition for that title is very steep. I have to admit that it’s pretty bad: consider these immortal lyrics: “She was always young at heart/Kinda dumb and kinda smart/And I loved her so”

9. If “Honey” was notable for anything other than its schlock, it was for exemplifying the trend toward country music crossing over into pop. A worthier country/pop entry in 1968 was Jeannie C. Reilly’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.” which scathingly attacked the hypocrisy of small town life.

10. Then there are Number One songs from 1968 that seem downright dangerous. The Doors’ “Hello I Love You” is ostensibly about Jim Morrison’s yearning for a girl walking down Venice Beach but the aggressiveness of the lyrics and the pulsing way in which they’re delivered seems scary even today. In any event it was the first 45 rpm stereo record.

So is 1968 the greatest year in music? I consistently liked more top songs from 1967 (Aretha’s “Respect,” The Monkees’ “I’m A Believer,” The Turtles’ “Happy Together,” The Doors’ “Light My Fire,” Bobby Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe,” The Association’s “Windy,” The Supremes’ “The Happening,” even Lulu’s “To Sir With Love.”) But any year in which “Hey Jude” could be heard on the radio for month after month has to rank high.

Suffice it to say that the Sixties really were the Golden Age of pop music. Almost every week another great new song appeared on the top 40 and since we all listened to the same Top 40 format we all had the same frame of reference. Those were the days, my friends. In fact, there was a big hit with that very title in 1968.

The Ten Most Memorable Television Moments From The Presidential Conventions

CBS Correspondent Mike Wallace arrested while covering the 1968 Democratic Convention

Well, it looks like those of us who’d so ardently hoped for a “contested convention” this summer will be denied again.  And if this wasn’t the year that a party convention ended up choosing the presidential candidate then maybe we should come to grips with the fact that it’s just not going to happen again in our lifetimes.

But that doesn’t mean these quadrennial events won’t provide good television.  Over the years some of the most exciting television moments have occurred at a presidential nominating convention.  Here are my nominations for the ten most memorable convention events of the television age:

1. Riots in Chicago (Dem 1968) – With the country in shock over the Kennedy and King assassinations and the party convulsed over the Vietnam War, the Democrats met in Chicago to nominate Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The result: the Chicago police beat up anti-war demonstrators as a civil war broke out inside the convention.  The footage is still shocking.

2.  Reagan Speech (GOP 1976) – The 1976 Republican convention was the last real contested convention, with Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford nearly tied heading into the voting. As the sitting president, Ford prevailed, and in a gesture of unity, invited Reagan to the podium. For most party regulars, who had, in this pre-Internet, pre-cable era, never heard Reagan speak, this emotional oration generated significant buyers’ remorse, as they realized they’d backed the wrong horse. Four years later they nominated Reagan and he went on to be elected.

3. First Obama Speech (Dem 2004) – Barack Obama was a little-known Illinois state legislator when he delivered an electrifying keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention, the one that nominated John Kerry. This speech, with its message of hope and inclusion, eventually powered Obama’s own drive to become President just four years later.

4. Cuomo and Jackson Excoriate Reagan (Dem 1984) – With Ronald Reagan riding high in 1984, two of the most gifted orators of the 20^th Century – Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson – rose to assail him as heartless and too beholden to the rich. Throughout history, most of the most memorable convention speeches have been delivered for losing causes, as was the case that year, but Cuomo laid the groundwork for “Occupy” rhetoric 27 years later and Jackson inspired the Rainbow Coalition that ultimately elected Barack Obama.

5. Clint Eastwood Interviews a Chair (GOP 2012) – In 2012 the Romney campaign was so eager for any hint of star power that they didn’t insist that Clint Eastwood clear his convention remarks beforehand. Instead of a standard convention speech, though, what they got was a bizarre piece of performance art in which Eastwood used the rhetorical device of asking questions to someone who wasn’t there (in this case President Obama).   Nice try. Stick to acting.

6. Reagan picks Bush as VP (GOP 1980) – The choice of a Vice President isn’t usually very exciting, unless it mobilizes part of the base, as it did with Geraldine Ferraro (1984) or Sarah Palin (2008). But in 1980, there were serious discussions about Ronald Regan choosing former President Jerry Ford as his VP.  That seemed to be the operating assumption until suddenly it wasn’t, to the shock of Walter Cronkite and Leslie Stahl.

7. Jeanne Kirkpatrick and the “San Francisco Democrats” (GOP 1984) – Reagan’s U.N. Ambassador, was a former Democrat and University professor and her foreign address in 1984 was little more than a lecture on the evils of Communism. Denouncing the “San Francisco Democrats” who were prone to “blame America first,” she managed to rouse the GOP convention through the sheer power of her analysis.

8. Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech (GOP 1964) – Goldwater was the Donald Trump of his day, considered too erratic and extreme to be allowed anyway near the nuclear codes. Like Trump, Goldwater doubled down, and to the howls of the convention, declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and that “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” He then went on to receive 38% of the popular vote.

9. The Al and Tipper Gore Lip Lock (Dem 2000) – What do you do when you are perceived as a nerd and a stiff? If you’re Al Gore, you go on national television and give your wife a long and ostensibly passionate kiss right after being nominated for president.  Ick.

10. Sarah Palin’s “Lipstick” speech (GOP 2008) — Before there was the Tea Party and its disdain of intellectualism and elites, there was Sarah Palin. What is forgotten now is how she revived the moribund McCain campaign and injected energy into his convention.  The speech itself, obviously not written by Palin, blistered Barack Obama with disdain while presenting herself as a just-folks representative of traditional America.   (“You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.”)  As she spoke, the camera focused on her family: her pregnant teenage daughter Bristol and Bristol’s “fiancé,” her infant son with Downs Syndrome being cradled by another daughter, and her military son about to be deployed. This was one of the first acknowledgments that political families need not be perfect.

Will something bizarre and exciting happy at the conventions this year?  My money is on the Trump coronation, with riots in the streets and the possibility of Trump extemporizing the biggest speech of his life.  But then again, who knows how the Sanders supporters will react at the Democratic convention.  Either way, it will be worth tuning in to see history made again.