Milk

It's funny that a biopic should feel so impersonal. Particularly one as fantastically-acted as this one. That's not a complaint, exactly. It just felt more like a movie about a movement and a moment in time than a person. In other words, the subject was not Milk's interior world but his exterior world. I think that's a perfectly legitimate tact to take, and certainly the movie is engaging, both intellectually and emotionally (false dichotomy alert). But I do think that it has a distancing effect, particularly for someone like me who wasn't born when these events took place and doesn't have any personal investment in them. And it robs the climax--the assassination itself--of some of the power it might otherwise have. Because it's the movement that matters in the movie, and we know that that continued.

That said, it's the best movie of gone to this year (although I've gone to very few movies) and I really did think it was excellent. Fairly conventional but the subject and performances make it extremely rewarding.