“You don’t watch Skinamarink so much as you sink into it, allowing yourself to be enveloped by the unsettling atmosphere. Ball keeps the camera close to the ground and peering into the shadows, attempting to make out shapes that never quite materialize. The whole movie feels like the lights just went out and your eyes haven’t quite adjusted yet.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/12/2023
“Even if the film’s depiction of neurodivergence will never be mistaken for sensitive, one must at least appreciate the audacity. The Old Way gropes around at some promising ideas, but the movie is cut too close to the bone to get much mileage out of these concepts, pulling back to meat-and-potatoes genre beats whenever things threaten to get really interesting.” – North Shore Movies, 01/12/2023
“Producers Roman Coppola and Gillian Jacobs present a movie assembled by eight different writer-director teams working independently of one another. As an experiment, it’s not uninteresting. But like most parlor games, this was probably a lot more fun for the participants than it is for the onlookers. One must remember that people have to pay to watch these things.” – North Shore Movies, 01/12/2023
“For most of its running time, M3GAN is a sicko comedy about terrible things happening to people (and animals) that deserve even worse, as well as a cautionary tale for moms and dads who find it easier to let electronic devices do the parenting for them. The best gag in Akela Cooper’s screenplay is how the doll turns evil because she spends too much time on the internet.” – North Shore Movies, 01/06/2023
“They’re clearly going for a Gran Torino thing here, with the grouchy old white guy who wants to be left alone begrudgingly befriending his adorable new immigrant neighbors and rescuing them from an external threat. But unlike Clint Eastwood’s hilariously crude codger, Hanks is merely dull and unpleasant. There’s nothing funny about his morose moods.” – North Shore Movies, 01/06/2023
“There’s a wonderfully enveloping atmosphere of doom in The Long Voyage Home, with the fog that drapes the sets feeling like a death shroud. O’Neill’s plays were minimalist affairs on nearly empty stages, and Ford finds a fascinating balance between the cramped, close-quarter scenes below deck and a boisterous, big-canvas action picture upstairs.” – Crooked Marquee, 01/06/2023
“It’s not just babies that are left behind in boxes. Kore-eda repeatedly returns to a subtle, yet insistent visual motif of constraining his characters inside similar shapes. Everyone in Broker is boxed in to some degree or another by bad luck, poor choices or the circumstances of their birth. The movie is about how we help each other get out.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/05/2023
SPLICED PERSONALITY 