“The Beach Bum doesn’t have a story so much as a series of slight speed bumps that barely slow down our libertine hero’s full bongo McConaughey-isms. Whether you’ll find it all enormously entertaining or mindlessly monotonous depends on your tolerance for this sort of thing. I had a good time but will admit it makes for a long 95 minutes.” – North Shore Movies, 03/29/2019
I returned to my favorite podcast and found someone lounging around on my wife’s sofa in her ex-husband’s dead-tech post-modernistic bullshit house. Had a blast with host Blake Howard talking about the funniest minute in Michael Mann’s Heat, discussing an earlier version of the scene that took place on Crime Story and relentlessly razzing poor Ralph. – One Heat Minute, 03/26/2019
“Writer-director Jia Zhangke’s expansive, melancholy gangster epic is deceptively direct in presentation, but a closer look reveals that even the simplest scenes contain multitudes. This massively entertaining melodrama is a deeply moving and fiercely ambivalent picture about old loyalties, new beginnings and the damnable passage of time.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/20/2019
DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE * * * 1 / 2
Starring Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, Tory Kittles, Jennifer Carpenter and Don Johnson. Written and directed by S. Craig Zahler.
“A heaping plate of meat-and-potatoes comfort food, Triple Frontier is a throwback to the sort of solid, mid-budget action pictures studios used to crank out during the spring and fall off-seasons back before everything had to be a godforsaken franchise. Unpretentious, unassuming and a bit better than expected, it’s the kind of movie you talk about with your dad.” – North Shore Movies, 03/15/2019
STARFISH * * * 1 / 2
Starring Virginia Gardner, Christina Masterson, Eric Beecroft, Natalie Mitchell, Shannon Hollander. Written and directed by A.T. White.
“In today’s Hollywood, women of a certain age too often find themselves making dirty grandma jokes in sitcom-y garbage like last year’s Book Club. Director Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria Bell is a blessedly more dignified affair, genuinely interested in growing older gracefully and attuned to an everyday loneliness that for a lot of folks is just a fact of life.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/14/2019
“Shot in 19 days on a minuscule budget, it’s a threadbare-looking movie short on extras and exteriors with stock footage standing in for most of the establishing shots. But this paucity of resources wouldn’t be such a problem if it didn’t also extend to the vision behind the project. Timoner brings no palpable passion nor any particular point of view.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/07/2019
“A drab-looking chase picture awash in tedious exposition and overbearing period pop culture references. The movie appears to visually constrict as it goes along, beginning in the vast reaches of outer space and moving through progressively smaller and less spectacular settings until finally everyone’s having a fist-fight in a rec room full of junk.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/06/2019
“I find Perry’s films fascinating in how violently they whiplash from juvenile tastelessness to churchy sermonizing and back again. The lowest of lowbrow comedy is interrupted by exhortations to get right with Jesus. Meanwhile, all of this is staged with such little regard for basic principles of filmmaking that certain scenes approach the realm of outsider art.” – North Shore Movies, 03/02/2019
SPLICED PERSONALITY 