“This has never been a show for people who want answers or explanations. You’ve just gotta sit back and let the images and sounds wash over you. The two-hour season premiere somehow managed to feel both familiar and strange, putting friendly faces in frightening new contexts, at once sweetly nostalgic and starkly sinister. It’s a hell of a thing.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/22/2017
ALIEN: COVENANT * * * *
Starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Amy Seimetz and Danny McBride. Screenplay by John Logan and Dante Harper. Directed by Ridley Scott.
“As sure-footed and satisfying an entertainment as I’ve seen so far this year, Lone Scherfig’s backstage screwball romance set during the London Blitz balances ensemble comedy and wartime tragedy with sturdy, old-fashioned aplomb. It’s the kind of movie you can point to when people say they don’t make ‘em like they used to.” – North Shore Movies, 05/18/2017
“It’s an almost agonizingly quiet movie, but all that quiet is full of contemplation. The Death Of Louis XIV allows viewers room to bring their own baggage, time and space to meditate on how mortality one day comes for us all. If you can get on this film’s admittedly peculiar wavelength it attains a hypnotic quality, eliciting genuine sorrow.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/18/2017
FOLK HERO & FUNNY GUY * * *
Starring Alex Karpovsky, Wyatt Russell, Meredith Hagner, Hannah Simone and Melanie Lynskey. Written and directed by Jeff Grace.
“What David Lynch is not going to do is gum up the works with too much self-analysis, and he remains constitutionally opposed to interpreting his work for us. The documentary is the portrait of a content man, constantly at work on one project or another, interested mainly these days in artistic expression as its own reward.” – Boston Reel, 05/14/2017
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 * * 1 / 2
Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper and Kurt Russell. Written and directed by James Gunn.
“What makes Davyeon feel so different is that writer-director Amman Abbasi transplants hood movie tropes to the Deep South, infusing the bucolic settings with some of the same junkyard lyricism we saw in executive producer David Gordon Green’s George Washington. The movie doesn’t end where you want it to, but it ends when it should.” – Boston Reel, 05/04/2017
“In a film where everything becomes a measuring contest, even the boys’ vape clouds are dicks. Hittman’s superlatively subjective camera sexualizes all in its path, damp with the New York City summer’s cruel humidity and a hazy, exhausted torpor. Beach Rats is the most evocative movie I’ve seen so far at the festival. It’s also the saddest.” – Boston Reel, 05/02/2017
“A solid, well-crafted little genre picture, which I assure you in this day and age is nothing to sneeze at. It’s the perfect kind of movie to premiere on Netflix, not quite distinguished enough to warrant a trip to the multiplex but ideal couch company on a rainy afternoon. Such modest virtues should not be underestimated.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/01/2017
SPLICED PERSONALITY 