“It’s a horrible holiday mostly spent suffering from the nagging feeling that whatever you’re doing you’re still not having as much fun as you’re supposed to be having, often while surrounded by amateurs who have no idea how to hold their liquor. At least this year sitting on the couch and watching movies is what you should be doing, for the sake of public health!” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/30/2020
“It must be swell to live in Jon Stewart’s imaginary America where race, religion and women’s rights are never mentioned and the divisions driving people to the polls are merely matters of educated liberals using big words and eating fancy foods that alienate real, meat-and-potatoes patriots. His deeply incurious satire feels like the worst film of 2004.” – North Shore Movies, 12/26/2020
“Some of the year’s most affecting pictures were about just making it through to tomorrow. This terrifying time of isolation made emotional connections onscreen feel all the more precious and fragile, with crowd scenes and hugs feeling like gifts we’d been taking for granted. Whatever the new normal may be, I hope some of the lessons of 2020 will be remembered.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/21/2020
“It’s an ungainly film but not ineffective, particularly in the silent scenes with a gruff Clooney hidden behind a large David Letterman beard, his haunted eyes filling in the missing dialogue. An unexpected spirit of can-do positivity carries it through to a revelation you can see coming lightyears away, yet made me cry all the same. Look, it’s been a long year.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/17/2020
“For such a square story it feels wonderfully subversive, as Ashe has moved the entire aesthetic of the Technicolor melodrama uptown. These perfectly painted sets and impeccably pressed clothes aren’t attempting to replicate reality, but rather a dream life in the movies from which people who look like the cast of Sylvie’s Love have always been excluded. Until now.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/17/2020
“The search for authentic experiences in our over-mediated age can be an elusive one, almost as slippery as this provocative mood piece from writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. In the film’s quieter moments we feel the character’s yearning for real connections in a modern world where everything, to some degree or another, is a performance being staged.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/17/2020
“Director Wolfe hasn’t made much of an attempt here to reimagine the play as a movie. Which is fine, because when the cast and the material are this strong sometimes it’s preferable to just have a record of the performances. Especially Boseman’s, which feels like the first role in the electrifying second act of a career cut heartbreakingly short. What an incalculable loss.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/17/2020
“Tenet is practically a Christopher Nolan fetish film, fawning over all the director’s favorite things: temporal loops, bespoke suits, large-format photography, sexless saviors, Michael Caine, dialogue-muffling masks and a curiously stunted way of looking at the world that feels derived almost entirely from James Bond movies of the 1960s and ’70s.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/17/2020
“Individual vignettes have purpose and snap while the larger point of it all remains a little fuzzy and out of focus. Still, it’s refreshing to see a movie about senior citizens in which their sex lives aren’t played for horrified laughs. Like its three leading ladies, the film is a class act and even if the destination is a bit disappointing this is still a trip worth taking.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/17/2020
SPLICED PERSONALITY 