“For fans, these 110 minutes will feel very much like a dream indeed, one full of fond, familiar faces in which old wrongs are righted, amends made and everyone takes a turn on the dance floor before getting a proper, sentimental sendoff. It will be your considerable happiness to see them again. But none of this comes easily. It’s still Deadwood, after all.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/30/2019
“Dearly beloved, what else is there to say about this thing called Purple Rain? It’s a truly bizarre movie, at once both atrocious and awesome, featuring musical performances so sublime you instantly forgive that the rest is so ridiculous. The quality gulf between onstage exhilaration and backstage soap opera here is roughly the size of Mother Russia.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/28/2019
“The final product has a strangely schizophrenic quality. Broad pop culture parody alternates with scenes of surprising tenderness. There’s a drug overdose played for wacky laughs which then gets walloped with an emotional sucker-punch by Dern, who at only thirteen years old was already hard at work being the best thing about whatever movie she’s in.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/28/2019
“Working from interviews both contemporaneous and recent, Raftery rattles off the stories of how these distinctive visions found their way into multiplexes in a bunch of punchy, largely self-contained chapters that read like the surprisingly meaty behind-the-scenes coverage you used to find in Premiere Magazine or Entertainment Weekly back in the ‘90s.” – North Shore Movies, 05/23/2019
“Director Franco Rosso’s rough-and-tumble portrait of immigrant life in the slums of Thatcher’s England is having its belated American theatrical release both 39 years late and depressingly right on time. The gasp-inducing final shot hangs in the air deliberately unresolved, like the racist hatred and police brutality that plague our communities still.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/20/2019
“Assayas has got a lot of ideas about how living in a digital realm has altered our attitudes toward art and culture, and he crams just about all of them into the guise of a sly sex comedy. He’s couched at least three movies’ worth of complex concepts inside an old-fashioned bedroom farce. It’s like a TED Talk in which everybody’s screwing and I loved it.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/16/2019
“The movie’s best joke is that there’s not much idealism left here to be corrupted, with everyone seeming to agree that the paper’s glory days are long in the rearview. This deceptively breezy film is really a sneaky generational portrait of young radicals running out of steam in their thirties. It has a wistful, end-of-an-era vibe that time has only sweetened.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/15/2019
“Kahiu struggles a bit juggling the tonal shifts and bungles a central act of violence, but even her missteps have a scrappy quality I found endearing. Rafiki reminds me of those occasionally clumsy underdog indies from the ‘90s New Queer Cinema movement, like a Kenyan cousin to The Incredibly True Adventures Of Two Girls In Love.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/10/2019
“Moss is miraculous here in a performance that leaves her guts smeared all over the floor, allowing us to see the wounded little girl inside the monster that terrorized us and the emotional scaffolding that held up her rock star persona. There’s a moment when she tries on the act again for a bit of banter and it’s like watching someone wear an ill-fitting suit.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/01/2019
SPLICED PERSONALITY 