“The movie presents common knowledge with gasps of shock and awe. It’s like getting a breathless lecture on something you lived through from someone who just learned about it yesterday. McKay never settles on a through-line. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened, shuffled all out of order and repeated a few times extra loud for the cheap seats.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/25/2018
“The crackerjack ensemble makes a meal out of Baldwin’s prose. Jenkins loves letting his characters speak directly into the lens, lending a gutsy emotional immediacy while James Laxton’s breathtaking cinematography grants even the tackiest 1970s orange and yellow decor an ethereal glow. It’s an achingly beautiful film, and so terribly sad.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/25/2018
“The Mule ambles along in the unhurried fashion of Clint’s easygoing Americana road pictures like Honkytonk Man or A Perfect World. Always a more thoughtful filmmaker than his often boneheaded public statements would lead you to believe, Eastwood fashions the picture into a sneaky examination of white privilege. There’s a lot going on under the hood here.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/25/2018
“Julia Roberts tells people off the way Steve McQueen drives or Al Pacino yells. Nobody does it better. So I can’t for the life of me understand why Hedges would discard all the carefully observed family drama and devote the back half of the picture to a forehead-smacking thriller plot that’s both incomprehensible and inane.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/25/2018
“Schrader’s portrait of a small town priest’s spiritual and mental disintegration is the movie that best captured for me what it felt like to be alive in 2018. Hawke gives the performance of a lifetime as a decent man driven mad upon realizing the extent of his powerlessness in the face of climate change, Big Oil and the ever-silent Almighty. Say amen, somebody.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/20/2018
“The Battlefield: Earth of gangster epics proceeds from the indefensible notion that the Teflon Don got a bum rap, depicting this murderous dirtbag as an aspirational figure of endangered masculine values in a fallen world of pussies and finks. It’s an astoundingly stupid, boring and ugly-spirited picture, full of angry-old-man axe-grinding and clownish goombah posturing.” – North Shore Movies, 12/20/2018
“A peculiar and deeply personal tale of trauma marketed via McDonald’s Happy Meals. The bat, the cat and the penguin now take their places at the MFA alongside Gummo, Welcome To The Dollhouse and Being John Malkovich. And I’ll tell you, the movie feels a heck of a lot more comfortable in such company than it ever did at shopping mall multiplexes.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/19/2018
1. First Reformed 2. BlacKkKlansman 3. You Were Never Really Here 4. The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs 5. Cold War 6. I Am Not A Witch 7. Shoplifters 8. Can You Ever Forgive Me? 9. Mandy 10. Vox Lux
Honorable Mentions: Annihilation, Bisbee ’17, Black Panther, Blaze, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, En El Séptimo Día, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Happy As Lazzaro, If Beale Street Could Talk, Never Goin’ Back, Nico, 1988, The Old Man & The Gun, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, A Star Is Born, Zama – BOFCA, 12/14/2018
“But it is in what Dafoe calls this ‘gaudy and unlivable present’ that the film truly roars. Vox Lux is an ostentatious diagnosis of contemporary American malaise, often horrifically funny and excitingly unencumbered by questions of good taste. Or, as I texted a friend shortly after the screening, ‘This movie is kind of an asshole and I think I love it.’” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/14/2018
“A madcap, laugh-a-minute sprint calling out just how unimaginative contemporary studio animation has become. Spider-Verse cheerfully tosses aside the Pixar house style to which most CGI adventures are beholden, indulging instead in wild, expressionistic flights of fancy complete with flying thought balloons, sound-effects text bubbles and narration blocks.” – North Shore Movies, 12/13/2018
SPLICED PERSONALITY 