“I’ve seldom seen a film that has less faith in its audience. It gently spits the pre-chewed meanings of scenes into the viewers’ mouths like we’re little baby birds at feeding time. The Fabelmans is the kind of movie that a lot of critics are going to love because it’s done all the interpretation for you in advance. Attendance is barely mandatory, our attention optional.” – North Shore Movies, 11/23/2022
“It’s an insanely uneven picture, conjuring a genuinely disturbing menace when not wallowing in sappy, po-faced YA tropes. Only Guadagnino would think that shooting Stephenie Meyer’s Trouble Every Day was a bright idea, and yet the movie’s gross-out romantic climax boasts such a birdbrained commitment to the bit that I begrudgingly surrendered.” – North Shore Movies, 11/23/2022
“Johnson again takes great pleasure in subverting audience expectations, doubling back and re-setting the story every time you think you’ve got it figured out. But Glass Onion is hardly a reprise of the previous picture, switching things up from autumnal, old money New England to the sun-drenched nouveau riche and striking a more overtly farcical tone.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/21/2022
“To the extent that The Menu works at all, it’s as a coming-out party for newly minted movie star Taylor-Joy, proving charismatic enough carry even a piece of junk like this on her shoulders. The rich shadings and deep shadows of Peter Deming’s marvelous cinematography play especially great on her angular features. You can see why the chef is smitten with her.” – North Shore Movies, 11/20/2022
“Moreau wanders the Paris streets at night, abandoned and alone. Malle and cinematographer Henri Decaë shot these scenes with their camera in a baby carriage, the scandalously makeup-free star illuminated only by the lights of the city surrounding her. Quietly revolutionary, it’s one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful passages in any movie of its era.” – Crooked Marquee, 11/18/2022
“If there’s a term for global warming in the Quechua language, we don’t hear it aloud. We don’t need to. Our impending climate catastrophe colors every action in the film, which is about what happens when a way of life becomes unsustainable. Utama is not exactly what one would call a subtle or particularly complex piece of storytelling. Nor does it need to be.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/17/2022
“Tarantino has a voracious appetite for cinema but it is by no means boundless, existing within sharply circumscribed parameters of genre and exploitation movies. His disdain for anything that could be perceived as highfalutin’ or hoity-toity is like living on a diet entirely of cheeseburgers, leaving the reader wishing that Quentin might try a salad once in a while.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/16/2022
“The rest of the film is given over to an unimaginative quest for revenge and advertisements for upcoming Disney content, eventually coming back around to familiar Marvel dogma that the most powerful weapons in the world are best left unchecked in the hands of royal families and benevolent billionaires, who will always have our best interests in mind.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/08/2022
“It is the month when we give thanks for leggy, duplicitous dames and doomed private dicks played for patsies. November is Noirvember, celebrating Hollywood’s hard-boiled fools for love and the frisky femme fatales that are their undoing, bringing back the best in cynical thrillers with bungled murder plots, bummer endings and sardonic voice-over narrations.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/04/2022
“The Outfit has been assembled with an unfussy expertise that seemed like no great shakes to film critics 49 years ago, but feels like a lost art today. Duvall is coiled like a cobra while big teddy bear Baker is expansive and gregarious. The latter basically steals the picture, lending considerable, cherubic warmth to the sometimes too-cool proceedings.” – Crooked Marquee, 11/04/2022
SPLICED PERSONALITY 