The reason that I haven’t delivered my usual “bests” in film for 2012 is that I saw no 2012 films during the year and have seen only two since (both of them documentaries), and the reason for that is that I’ve spent long stretches of time in hospitals and nursing centers. I am ill; I […]

Sylvia Sidney, here exquisitely lovely as well as delicately poignant, gives her finest performance in the title role of Jennie Gerhardt, based on Theodore Dreiser’s 1911 novel. Dreiser, who didn’t think much of the novel, his second, nevertheless admired the film, which he described as “beautifully interpreted.” Director Marion Gering gave this piece of work […]

Haunting as well as most impressive, British documentarian Bill Morrison’s The Miners’ Hymns mines black-and-white archival material from one hundred years earlier, and more, to assemble a portrait of workers—coal miners—lost to time, and to juxtapose their permanent anonymity with the expanses of land in northeast England below which the mines, long since permanently shut […]

Produced by Max Fleischer and directed by brother Dave, their Snow-White is a masterpiece of animation. The “dwarfs” are (thank goodness!) banished to the briefest edge of the action (and to the Mystery Cave, where they deposit Snow-White to protect her from her stepmother’s jealous wrath), and the Prince is eliminated entirely; from the Grimm […]