“Mostly presented without sound, these clips provide tantalizing glimpses of a strikingly modern, practically cosmopolitan Afghanistan that’s a stark contrast to the ruins we’ve been seeing on the news for the past two decades. The movies have an endearingly amateurish quality, while the filmmakers provide hair-raising anecdotes about their productions.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 08/24/2021

“Don Rugoff figured out how to sell an entire generation of uptown sophisticates on difficult foreign language pictures and scrappy American indies, turning art films into cultural events. He changed the way movies are marketed and made, and I’d never heard of him until last week. Rugoff died penniless in 1989, a figure forgotten by film history. Until now.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 08/19/2021

“As a director he’s one of the few Hollywood natives who knows how to shoot Middle America without making it look like a beer commercial. We also tend to forget what a powerful performer Penn can be when he cares about the material. The star spent the first half of his career wishing he’d played Ratso Rizzo and now he clearly can’t wait to be Willy Loman.” – North Shore Movies, 08/19/2021

“Exploding onscreen with a modern dance troupe’s syncopated movements in front of a pulsating pink sun, scenes spill out in fragments that skip back and forth in time, on beat with the music. Ema is instantly mesmerizing. Larraín forces us to put together the shattered shards of a story as it surges along, like we’re one of the movie’s many dance partners.” – North Shore Movies, 08/13/2021

“Hudson is up to the formidable task, belting her heart out in an otherwise boilerplate Hollywood product. Respect is about as good as a conventional musical biopic can be while still being a conventional musical biopic. There are worse ways to spend two-and-a-half hours than listening to Jennifer Hudson sing Aretha Franklin songs.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 08/12/2021

“Sure, they say the ‘f-word’ a lot, but never the Matt Damon one. These characters cuss constantly without uttering anything actually offensive. The eviscerations are weightless and without consequence, in a movie that for all its naughty posturing is about as dangerous as a trip to the mall, with production design by Hot Topic and bad jokes from Spencer’s Gifts.” – North Shore Movies, 08/05/2021

“A passionately overheated melodrama about creativity and cruelty, it is by turns, an ecstatic and intensely alienating experience. Annette might not be a movie for everybody, but setting $15 million on fire for such a singular, crackpot vision strikes me as a far more productive waste of Amazon’s money than sending a divorced billionaire to space.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 08/03/2021

“A strange landscape that sometimes seems to move in slow motion, full of uncanny, unexplained incidents and haunted interludes. Buyer beware: It owes less to Game Of Thrones and more to acid Westerns like El Topo and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. What’s transfixing is the eerie, immersive vibe. This is the kind of movie you get lost in for a little while.” – North Shore Movies, 08/03/2021