“I’ve wrestled with whether or not I’m trivializing serious subject matter when I tell people I spent most of this movie on the edge of my seat. Thanks to the extraordinary access attained by France, we’re provided passenger seat views of daring midnight escapes and hair-raising trips through customs, with a percolating electronic score out of a Michael Mann picture.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/30/2020
“In synopsis I suppose some of these beats might sound familiar —repetitive even— but that’s because they are eternal. In its swooniest moments the movie conjures a breathless sense of heart-skipping hedonism, a first visit to the secret world of older girls and that feeling of the night opening up and stretching out forever with endless possibility.” – North Shore Movies, 06/25/2020
“Any other summer Irresistible might merely have seemed toothless and out of touch, but viewed through the prism of our particular moment it’s actively insulting. A smugly condescending attempt to skewer liberal condescension, the movie is as clueless as its stumblebum protagonist and a sterling example of everything it attempts to scold.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/25/2020
“Scanlen holds it all together. She’s not playing an abstraction or an idea, nor is Milla a mere vehicle for the male character’s redemption. In any sane world this wouldn’t be much of a novelty, but it turns out that centering the female protagonist instead of the guy whose life she’s enriching by dying makes a very old story feel (almost) new.” – North Shore Movies, 06/23/2020
“Former film critic Assayas is once again tinkering with story structure the way smart kids like to take apart their toys to see how they work. I’m not sure if the movie-shattering halftime reveal ultimately adds up to much more than a nifty gimmick, but it sure is a fun way to keep Wasp Network from being yet another procession of re-enacted historical events.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/18/2020
“You don’t need to be a horror film scholar to guess that the house is going to hold him accountable for the sins of his past, but what’s unpredictable about the movie is a fully realized, adult dynamic between Bacon and Seyfried, set to a semi-abusive simmer that proves far more unsettling than when reflections in the mirror begin moving of their own accord.” – North Shore Movies, 06/18/2020
“Lee and Willmott are both full-time cinema studies professors, and Da 5 Bloods is as much a movie about war as it is about war movies. Like their previous collaborations BlacKkKlansman and Chi-Raq, the film is constantly in the process of deconstructing its own iconography, capitalizing on our familiarity with the genre to both playful and provocative ends.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/11/2020
“Director Jeffrey McHale avoids talking head interviews, relying entirely on archival footage, voice-over narration and artfully manipulated clips from not just Showgirls but the entire Paul Verhoeven canon, picking out patterns and precedents. It might sound like a joke, but this is really a rather thoughtful and enlightening work of film criticism.” – North Shore Movies, 06/11/2020
“By my watch it’s a full 93 minutes before Scott finally starts hanging out at the firehouse with some of his dad’s old buddies. No points for guessing that our screwed-up kid learns a few important lessons about pride, manhood, and responsibility through his ball-busting banter with FDNY’s finest, which is all pretty cornball and retrograde, but at least it’s a direction.” – North Shore Movies, 06/08/2020
“As in her 2018 triumph Madeline’s Madeline, Decker takes a destabilizing approach to scenes, eschewing establishing shots and shoving the camera too close to the characters at odd, disjunctive angles. Shirley is only her fourth feature but Decker’s already developed an instantly recognizable visual style that feels like it’s made entirely of elbows.” – North Shore Movies, 06/05/2020
