My first dispatch from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Josh Osit’s Predators, Albert Birney’s OBEX and Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill.
Continue readingSUNDANCE 2025 PART ONE: PREDATORS, OBEX, THE THINGS YOU KILL
Monthly Archives: January 2025
THE POISONOUS ENTROPY OF MIKE LEIGH’S MEANTIME
”The film follows an unemployed family struggling in London’s East End council estates, bluntly confronting the grinding boredom of life on the dole and the seething resentments it breeds. Nearly everything in the film is curdled and ugly, even the humor aggressive and sour. It’s one of the most vivid depictions of how people without purpose turn on each other.” – Crooked Marquee, 01/31/2025
I’M STILL HERE
“The steady, level-headed gaze of I’m Still Here is never as dramatically satisfying as you want it to be. It’s only in brief interludes, like at a restaurant where Eunice watches families dining together the way hers never will again, that Torres allows us to glimpse the full scale of the character’s heartbreak. The rest of the time there’s too much to do. Life goes on.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/31/2025
BLACK HISTORY ICONS AT THE COOLIDGE
“The Coolidge Corner Theatre celebrates Black History Month with Icons, a six-film retrospective shining a spotlight on groundbreaking performances from throughout the years. The series kicks off with Carmen Jones, director Otto Preminger’s fascinating 1954 attempt to film Oscar Hammerstein II’s Broadway update of Bizet’s Carmen with an all-Black cast.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/30/2025
LOOKING BACK AT DONT LOOK BACK
”From the missing apostrophe in the title to the herky-jerky, handheld camera and constantly slipping focus, Pennebaker’s film feautres none of the spit and polish one usually sees in showbiz docs. It’s a lot of bumpy rides from one nondescript hotel room to another, probably the most accurate depiction ever filmed of the tensions and tedium of life on the road.” – Crooked Marquee, 01/24/2025
FLIGHT RISK
”Crap, but not in that fun, meathead January genre movie way that provides cool counter-programming to all the Oscar nominees. It’s chintzy trash made by faded stars who are slumming. Flight Risk is incompetent hackwork, directed without attention or purpose. It’s not even gratuitously violent, which I thought was the whole point of a Mel Gibson movie.” – North Shore Movies, 01/24/2025
PRESENCE
”Scenes play out in single, unbroken takes as the spectral spectator drifts up and down the stairs, darting in and out of bedrooms. If nothing else, it’s an incredible feat of athleticism by the 62-year-old camera operator. I got tired just watching some of these shots. Presence is a gimmick movie with a great gimmick. Too bad about the ‘movie’ part.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/23/2025
EXPLAIN BOSTON TO ME: BOSTON CRIME MOVIES
Joined Philadelphia expat Lee Stabert to talk about the Boston crime movie craze and my pet theory that these films became popular because they allow Hollywood to make underclass gangster movies without having to cast Black people. We also discussed the willful nostalgia of these films harkening back to a pre-gentrification Boston before the biotech boom. – Explain Boston To Me, 01/22/2025
BETTER MAN
“It’s a brilliant device, externalizing how the performer sees himself as a dancing monkey. (I know a chimp is an ape, not a monkey, but we don’t need to be pedantic about it. This is why nobody likes Neil deGrasse Tyson.) Celebrity makes people strange and sets them apart from others. Crowds can’t help but stare, the way they would at a chimp wearing a tuxedo.” – North Shore Movies, 01/17/2025
THE DECADE PROJECT: BRIDGE OF SPIES
Can a well-regarded Oscar-winner still feel underrated? On a subscribers only episode of The Decade Project, Blake Howard and I talk about Steven Spielberg’s 2015 collaboration with the Coen brothers, a sly civics lesson with a killer Hanks performance and some classically Coen-esque wordplay. A film full of the unshowy artistry folks foolishly take for granted. – One Heat Minute, 01/16/2025
SPLICED PERSONALITY 