“The conventionality of Crawford’s film starts to make more sense when you realize he’s covering Creem as if it were a great rock ‘n’ roll band, elevating these madmen scribblers to the same heights as the stars they chronicled and reveling in the debauched office shenanigans the way traditional music documentaries dish backstage gossip.” – North Shore Movies, 08/03/2020
“The 720-page novel follows a frustrated film critic to the end of civilization and beyond as he attempts to review a movie so massive he can’t wrap his mind around it. Like most of Kaufman’s work, it’s about the slow suffocation of solipsism, and the impossibility of engaging with art — or anything else, for that matter — when you can’t get out of your own way.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/31/2020
“After a harrowing first hour, the rest of the documentary is almost relentlessly upbeat. I was especially taken with tales of Robert De Niro’s generous treatment of his Heat and Machete co-star. He’s said to have told Trejo, ‘Take whatever roles they offer you, because these people have short memories,’ which explains a lot about both of their careers, I guess.” – North Shore Movies, 07/31/2020
“This very funny, semi-autobiographical debut feature from writer-director Karen Maine is about an uptight Catholic schoolgirl trying to make sense of her new downstairs yearnings. There are a lot of bawdy coming-of-age movies but you won’t find many this gentle and sweet. It’s the warmest, fuzziest film I’ve ever seen about masturbating to internet porn.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/23/2020
“Philandering houseguests discovering cameras in their showerheads is actually a pretty good hook for a sicko comedy––one dreams of what Brian De Palma might have done with it––but Franco’s directorial debut is swallowed up in the gloom of Christian Sprenger’s underexposed cinematography. Some movies are hard to watch, this one’s hard to see.” – North Shore Movies, 07/23/2020
“Initially I was worried that with such a thrillingly dunderheaded title Money Plane would be another winking exercise in fatuousness, a movie made to be meme’d. So I was flooded with relief during the film’s opening moments to find this is no smarmy, meta-exercise in self-mockery, but rather a feat of genuine incompetence. It comes by its crappiness honestly.” – North Shore Movies, 07/22/2020
“The Painted Bird is about how war dehumanizes and destroys everything it touches. It crushes spirits and forces people to become their worst possible selves. As a culture we cling to the myth that suffering somehow ennobles people and turns them into better human beings, when mostly it just makes them mean. Some stories are supposed to hurt.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/16/2020
“Hanks has developed at least a dozen different ways of narrowing his eyes, and he subtly shows us everything the commander would never dare say out loud. Without making a big fuss over it, Greyhound is a movie about life-and-death decisions that must be made in split-seconds. We watch how heavily they weigh on heroes.” – North Shore Movies, 07/10/2020
“This affable Groundhog Day knockoff is a genially mediocre time-killer that feels a lot more at home on your television set than it did on a big screen. I suppose like a lot of streaming titles Palm Springs will play pleasantly in the background while you’re doing laundry, escaping any questions about how something so slight could have set records at Sundance.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/09/2020
“Metaphor alert! Relic is actually about the horrors of old age, with Edna’s encroaching dementia manifesting itself through supernatural means because otherwise this would be another Alzheimer’s movie and those are awfully hard to watch. It’s a good idea squandered in the frustratingly vague screenplay by James and her co-writer Christian White.” – North Shore Movies, 07/09/2020
