10. To the Wonder.   In a year that included the likes of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and The Grandmaster, perhaps no popular film justifies use of the cliché “visual storytelling” more than writer/director Terence Malick’s To the Wonder.  The underlying narrative (such that it is) covers the life cycle of a love affair (said lovers played by Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko).  Alternating between the idyllic and the realistic, the dialogue (such that ... Read More »

Spoiler Scale (How spoilery is this article on a scale of 1 to 10?):  4   (NOTE:  This review does contain spoilers of the two previous films, Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004).) In the interests of full disclosure, I must confess to a certain unavoidable degree of subjectivity in assessing what has become writer/director Richard Linklater’s fictional riff on the Seven Up! documentaries (1964-).  I was a 24 ... Read More »