“Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters sneaks up on you. It starts out as a low-key charmer akin to the filmmaker’s Still Walking or After The Storm, but then about an hour into this placid portrait things begin to unravel, undercutting the audience’s assumptions and steadily accumulating great weight and moral severity. By the time it ended I was a wreck.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/30/2018
“Paramount took the costly and fairly unprecedented step of re-releasing it with an overhauled promotional campaign, to little avail. Yet it’s somehow fitting that Wonder Boys managed to flop twice, as the movie is practically a valentine to failure. This is a warmly humane and often side-splittingly funny exploration of underperforming against expectations.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/27/2018
Had a wonderful time as always sitting in with friends Kris Jenson and Evan Crean to discuss Chris Pine’s full frontal Netflix epic, some highlights from the Boston Jewish Film Festival, a disappointing new sequel that probably just should have been called Rocky VIII and Evan’s unexpected reaction to finally seeing First Reformed. – Spoilerpiece Theatre, 11/24/2018
“Orson Welles’ long-mythologized pet project, shot over a period of several years in the early 1970s, is an astonishment even wilder and more rewardingly confounding than its fabled reputation. Prickly, perverse and almost half a century later still way ahead of its time, I watched this movie twice the day it premiered and haven’t shut up about it since.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/23/2018
“It took me longer than I should probably admit to figure out that the manic camera movements are meant to mimic Van Gogh’s rapid brushstrokes, and the repeated words an aural stand-in for the artist’s layered overpainting. So basically Schnabel’s trying to make a movie about Vincent Van Gogh in the style of Vincent Van Gogh, which is pretty neat.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/21/2018
“Pretty much the movie everyone was afraid Creed was going to be. A few fine character beats drift into stale, over-familiar formulas and fawning fan service. Well-acted enough that I couldn’t hate it, but it’s all so purposefully secondhand, deliberately designed to remind you of previous installments you loved without going anywhere exciting or new.” – North Shore Movies, 11/20/2018
“A collection of six vignettes varying wildly in tone yet unified by the sardonic siblings’ prankish existentialism. These punchy little tales veer from zany slapstick to heartbreaking tragedy, all working in service of the Coens’ fatalistic, class-clown philosophy, according to which life might be just a cruel, cosmic joke but it’s a pretty good one sometimes.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/16/2018
“Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner may not be the worst movie of the year, but it’s gotta be the most inessential and out-of-touch. This banal, deeply incurious picture exudes entitlement, pining away for the good old days when the privileged and powerful closed ranks to protect their own. Reitman should make a Brett Kavanaugh film next.” – North Shore Movies, 11/15/2018
“As in Gotti, Travolta just seems miserable, alternating between scrunching up his face like something smells bad and looking like he has to poop. There’s hilariously little attention to period detail and no attempt to age the star accordingly over the story’s twenty-five year span. He appears to wear the same denim shirt for decades.” – North Shore Movies, 11/15/2018
“Green Book plays like a Trumpist’s anti-Obama empowerment fantasy, in which a proudly ignorant white prole is constantly humiliating an erudite, sophisticated black man and showing him how the world really works. I wondered again why white audiences still seem to crave these movies, aching to be reassured that racism is bad but we’re still okay.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/15/2018
SPLICED PERSONALITY 