“By bumping the arrival of Tom White and his federal agents to the film’s third hour, they’ve transformed a procedural into an inquiry, using DiCaprio’s irrepressible magnetism to plumb the depths of denial and culpability amid an atrocity, an unsettling examination of soul sick men who are strangers to themselves. In other words, they turned it into a Scorsese movie.” – North Shore Movies, 10/29/2023
“Like watching a magnificent athlete on a Stairmaster, Fincher’s barebones adaptation of a French comic book series has a story as nondescript as its title, continually distracting itself from the flaccid narrative with the filmmaker’s signature stylistic tics. Absent any visible inspiration or discernible reason for being, it’s a project that exists because it can.” – North Shore Movies, 10/29/2023
”Slyly makes a metaphor out of the literal skeletons beneath 1980s prosperity as exemplified by the Cuesta Verde development, lending this haunted house picture a thematic complexity that foreshadows Spielberg’s more overt interrogations of American myths a decade or so later. I mean, there’s a reason the movie begins with the National Anthem.” – Crooked Marquee, 10/27/2023
”It’s the kind of sophisticated entertainment for adults that one usually has to find overseas or on television these days. In fact, despite being awarded top prize at the world’s foremost film festival, Anatomy Of A Fall feels more like one of those prestige cable miniseries that your co-workers are always going on about on Monday mornings.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/26/2023
“You know that horror films are always better with a crowd. Shocktober brings an embarrassment of riches for Boston area moviegoers looking for something even more terrifying than trying to park in Salem. With more than two dozen frightening films screening locally during the run up to All Hallows’ Eve, here are six favorites to get you started.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/25/2023
“Though a good deal more technically polished and slightly less scatologically obsessed, this strenuously filthy comedy is director Larry Charles’ tribute to the ebullient, transgressive early films of John Waters. The movie tries hard to muster the same shocking, anything-goes energy of a midnight madness screening. Sometimes it tries too hard.” – North Shore Movies, 10/19/2023
“Nobody’s better at feigning astonishment at things she obviously knew were going to happen. I’ve long thought one of the smartest things Swift ever did was not learning how to dance very well. She’s such a disciplined workhorse she could probably do so in a weekend, but the slightly goofy gait helps keep her relatable, at once larger than life and the girl next door.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/17/2023
”Friedkin was never big on ‘opening up’ the action of plays with pointless exteriors, preferring instead to double down on the stage-bound claustrophobia and turn them into pressure-cookers. The director adapted the teleplay himself, updating Wouk’s WWII Pacific Theater setting to the present day Persian Gulf and stepping on the gas. This thing moves like a rocket.” – North Shore Movies, 10/13/2023
“If you find your way onto Bresson’s frequency, his films can feel like they’ve transcended cinema’s inherent artifice and found a purer, more exaltedly spiritual mode of storytelling. There’s a reason Paul Schrader has made an entire career out of remaking Pickpocket and Diary Of A Country Priest. There’s also a reason Bresson’s most beloved movie stars a donkey.” – Crooked Marquee, 10/13/2023
“At once a mystic oracle and half-kidding huckster, legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog has spent his six-decade career shooting on seven different continents, chronicling humankind’s fraught relationship with a cruel and indifferent universe through thirty-four documentaries and twenty dramatic features, as well as dozens of shorts, operas and television programs.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/09/2023
SPLICED PERSONALITY 