“White Noise trusts the viewer enough to treat us like adults who can see for ourselves the vast emptiness in the lives of these people, their intense need for the validation of strangers and how desperately they cling to the notion of birthright superiority because they have no other ideas or accomplishments of which to speak.” – North Shore Movies, 10/31/2020
“Like Western Stars, the film was shot at Springsteen’s ranch in New Jersey by director Thom Zimny, alternating excellent performance footage in Bruce’s home studio with slightly gaseous oratory as the camera caresses his property’s exteriors. I’m not sure I’d quite call it ‘a movie,’ but this is one of the more soulful promotional items you’ll come across.” – North Shore Movies, 10/31/2020
“The Fall Focus kicks off with Minari, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this past January’s Sundance Film Festival. It’s a wonderful, warm-hearted movie about a Korean family that moves to the outskirts of rural Arkansas in pursuit of the American dream. ‘This was one of my favorite films at Sundance, which feels like 12 years ago,’ Campbell enthuses.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/27/2020
“Coppola has perhaps too dreamy a disposition for the snap of screwball comedy, allowing space to study the ripples a teardrop makes in a half-empty martini glass. On The Rocks is a beguilingly personal picture, with the First Daughter of American cinema making a movie about a woman trying to find her own light in the shadow of a larger-than-life dad.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/22/2020
“The perfect movie for a country sickened by plague and politics, it finds our disgraced reporter stumbling undercover around CPAC, synagogues and anti-mask rallies. Unspeakably gross and containing something sure to offend just about everybody, it’s also sort of sweet. Schmaltzy, even. Or at least as schmaltzy as a Baron Cohen movie can be.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/21/2020
“What’s endlessly confirmed is that he was a hilarious cheapskate, charging friends to use the telephone at his home and taking care to save not just the buttons from his old, discarded shirts but also the rubber bands wrapped around his morning newspapers. With two Rolls-Royces stashed in separate cities, Cary Grant still clipped coupons.” – North Shore Movies, 10/20/2020
“It’s a story perfectly suited for Sorkin, a screenwriter who specializes in soaring, self-righteous speeches by quippy idealists who love being smarter than you. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is his best script since The Social Network, chockablock with hyperliterate zingers and groovy grandstanding. Nobody really talks this way but we all wish we did.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/15/2020
“Shot in secret over the past few months, it’s a sober, step-by-step recounting of the Trump administration’s catastrophically bungled response to COVID-19. There are no big revelations here, the movie’s mostly stuff we already knew. Yet seeing it all laid out end-to-end like this made me so furious I had to go walk it off for a little while.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/14/2020
“Writer-director Quirke clearly saw Black Swan and liked it an awful lot, but I’m starting to think that filmmakers should have to apply for a license before being allowed to shoot in ‘scope. Maybe require them to turn in two or three storyboards showing how they plan to utilize the widescreen frame for something more than just TV that’s squinting.” – North Shore Movies, 10/13/2020
My sixth and final dispatch from the 58th New York Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Steve McQueen’s Red, White And Blue, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning, Gianfranco Rosi’s Notturno, Azazel Jacobs’ French Exit and Spike Lee’s film of David Byrne’s American Utopia.
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