”Set in a fairytale Manhattan familiar from champagne comedies of the 1930s, it’s a gentle slapstick jumble of missed connections, mistaken assumptions and doors being slammed in people’s faces at fancy hotels. It’s the kind of movie where the private detective wears silly disguises because scenes like these are funnier if someone’s dressed like a rabbi.” – North Shore Movies, 02/28/2025
”We meet more than seventy characters on a long, hot summer night’s journey into day, catching them on the fly as they come together or part ways. It’s a movie that’s all climaxes, a dizzyingly romantic array of clinches and farewells that becomes a hypnotic abstraction of bodies clasping together and ripping themselves asunder. You watch it like fireworks.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/28/2025
“One of my favorite Oscar moments occurred during the 2002 ceremony when Robert Altman and David Lynch both lost the Academy Award for Best Director to Ron Howard for A Beautiful Mind. Lynch later recollected that when Howard’s name was announced, Altman had called him over, pulled him close and said, ‘It’s better this way, David.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/27/2025
”However hard To Live and Die in L.A. might try to look and sound like another gleaming, shitty ‘80s movie, it’s got the rotting, miserable soul of a 1970s masterpiece. The movie’s slick, music video affectations can’t conceal the fundamental scuzziness. All the golden sunsets and neon lights feel like a battered woman’s smudged makeup over a black eye.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/21/2025
”Burns’ beer commercial good looks have served him well in Hollywood rom-coms over the years, and here once again provide motivation for the filmmaker’s favorite themes: (1.) ‘Look how many beautiful women want to sleep with Edward Burns’ and (2.) ‘These bitches sure are crazy.’ Yeah, it’s awkward sharing a surname with a filmmaker you think sucks.” – North Shore Movies, 02/21/2025
”The funniest movie I’ve seen in months. A marathon of sicko gallows humor that expands and expounds upon King’s short story in ways both irreverent and playfully profound, it’s a cathartically comic burlesque of gag-inducing set-pieces, rivaling the Final Destination films for Rube Goldberg death scenes. God help me, I laughed like a hyena.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/20/2025
”Zellweger has two Oscars, and one of them should have been for playing Bridget. (The other should have been for Jerry Maguire.) She can still pull off the randy, granny-panty humor, while her crinkly smile is suited to a sequel that’s funny but also heavier of heart. Zellweger and Grant knock the raunchy banter back and forth with a genuinely moving affection.” – North Shore Movies, 02/14/2025
”The problem with The Gorge is, well, the gorge. While the unexpectedly delightful first hour is given over to the pleasures of watching attractive, charismatic people fall for each other – something we see entirely too little of at the movies these days – it devolves into an uninspired, splattery shoot ‘em up full of dodgy CGI and hackneyed leaps of forehead-smacking illogic.” – North Shore Movies, 02/14/2025
”While it was admittedly idiotic of me to go looking for ideas in a $180 million Disney movie, for that price one should expect at least a modicum of craft. And on that level Brave New World is a catastrophe. This is an appalling-looking film, shot in TV standard medium closeups with a smear of fake film grain spackled over the image like an ugly Instagram filter.” – North Shore Movies, 02/14/2025
“You’ve got to have a lot of confidence to come up with a scene like that. But then it’s not surprising that Tøndel has got such swagger, given that he’s the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann. Armand is awesomely audacious and drunk on its own technique, though sometimes you might wish there was a bit more to the movie than audacity alone.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/13/2025
SPLICED PERSONALITY 