I’m always skeptical when a film receives too much hype. With the on-again, off-again quality of American fare, I try not to set my hopes too high, especially when it comes to a film about the D.C. Comics's The Joker, by the director of “The Hangover” series.

It is with great pleasure that I report that, while the film itself isn’t the cinematic masterpiece that some have christened it, Todd Phillips’s “Joker” is one of the finest films of 2019 with Joaquin Phoenix delivering one of the great performances of modern cinema, and definitely his personal best.

And here's me breathing a sigh of relief. Almodovar has made another masterpiece, a work of art. “Dolor y Gloria" is sublime! I’d become disillusioned with the El Deseo jefe. “Broken embraces,” “La Piel que lo habito” were colorful, if shoddily-written films that lacked substance and felt saturated with fabricated emotions. Those were films, I could but only deduce, made by a filmmaker in existential decline. But with "Dolor y Gloria,”

Rob Zombie’s latest film “3 From Hell” is the third film in his Firefly Clan trilogy and quite simply one of his best ones. This is a blood-soaked homage to the seventies grindhouse films that Zombie grew up admiring and the kind of wild genre craziness that became a major influence on both his music and directorial style.

This is intense genre filmmaking on high levels. Zombie has been coasting for some years

Mexico City in the nineties was a place where the harshest crimes went unpunished due to money and a corrupt police force.

Aida (an excellent and tortured performance from Diana Lein, an actress to watch!) serves up revenge for young women who have been raped and maltreated and weren’t able to find resolution on their own.

Working out of the back of a nightclub, the women

How screwed up is America? In Annie Silverstein’s “Bull,” when young Kris (Amber Havard) gets arrested for breaking and entering and she’s offered a deal, she replies, “can’t you just send me to juvie?” The level of resignation that Kris, or other people like her in real life, must feel, is both baffling and dismaying. In Trump’s America, people like her who go through difficulties just shrug it off, hope for the best and

Whether you like Bruce Springsteen or not, I dare any viewer of this movie not to be completely swept away by the pure joy of the infectious “Blinded by the Light.”

Inspired by Sarfraz Manzoor’s 2007 memoir “Greetings from Bury Park,” the film “is inspired by the words and music of Bruce Springsteen.”

Set in 1987 Luton (a working-class town in southeast England)

I think cinema, I love cinema, I see a great number of films during the year and always have. If asked to list great director names, I would reply, Fellini, Bergman, Fassbinder, Kurosawa and Kubrick. Though a hundred names would barely begin to cover it. But… and oh, yes, Tarentino. Despite not much enjoying his movies—too much violence, albeit often humorous, rivers of blood, and a permanent agitation—I believe I’ve seen all his films since “Reservoir Dogs.”