“Short on incident but terribly long on portentous brooding, The Keeping Room feels like 1970’s grindhouse rape-splotiaton fare tarted up with modern prestige picture delusions of grandeur. Substituting dread for suspense, it’s an exceedingly difficult movie to sit through, and offers little reward for doing so.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/24/2015
“GoodFellas is one of the great sustained acts of virtuosity in American cinema, the artistry so in-your-face and swaggering that even a fifteen-year-old kid who only knew what he was talking about half the time could see the man behind the curtain working the levers, and that made it all the more thrilling. I finally understood what it meant for a movie to be directed.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/21/2015
“The white suit, that lighted dance floor, the strut — so many tropes have become part of our shared pop iconography that a lot folks tend to just assume they’ve seen the movie at some point, if only through cultural osmosis. Here’s a good way to tell for sure: If you’re laughing derisively about it, you haven’t watched Saturday Night Fever recently.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 09/21/2015
“There’s no arc to the story, just bullet-points over two decades. Whitey killed a lot of people and got away with it until he didn’t anymore. The filmmakers have no angle, no larger themes. The depositions haven’t been sculpted into drama. It’s a dull recitation of tired material that will feel like the Stations of the Cross to anyone who reads The Boston Herald.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/18/2015
Had a great time sitting in with fellow Boston Online Film Critics Association members Kris Jenson and Evan Crean as they tried to talk me into and out of going to see The Visit. We also discussed Grandma, 90 Minutes In Heaven and a whole lotta other random shit. – Spoilerpiece Theatre, 09/11/2015
“A staggeringly uneventful movie made for an audience to which I obviously do not belong. I’m at a loss to convey how little happens during this picture. It’s a film almost entirely devoid of incident. Piper’s book hasn’t been shaped into anything resembling a story. It’s just unfortunate stuff that happened to a guy and then he got over it, eventually.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/11/2015
TIME OUT OF MIND * * * 1 / 2
Starring Richard Gere, Ben Vereen, Jena Malone, Kyra Sedgwick and Steve Buscemi. Written and directed by Oren Moverman.
“The film is very much what you would expect from a movie directed by Captain America. It’s old-fashioned, a little corny, and almost impossible to resist. Before We Go isn’t a great picture nor even a particularly memorable one. But the bottom line is that I liked spending time with these people. You probably will, too.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/04/2015
