I caught Chris Rock‘s Top Five towards the end of the Toronto Film Festival, and despite liking it for the most part and the film having generated a certain hoo-hah, I somehow managed to not file anything. Odd. Rock has made a good, smart-ass, to some extent Annie Hall-ish comedy about…well, presumably his own personal and professional travails to some extent but in a broader sense the whole tangled mess of it all (career, alcoholism, creative burnout, media glare, bad-news trophy wives, family). Good-natured but sharp and sometimes stinging, his third directorial outing comes the closest to generating the wily energy of Rock’s stand-up routines…it feels pulled from the raw and “real” as far as it goes. The only weak spot is an odd decision to portray a N.Y. Times writer (Rosario Dawson) as guilty of an ethical breach that would never be tolerated in actuality. A bothersome issue that I buried in a drawer somewhere. Top Five is Rock’s best film so far, a breakthrough of sorts, an 8.5.