“In the space of just five evenings, IFFBoston’s Fall Focus selection highlights the diversity for which this local treasure of a festival is renowned: documentary, indie thriller, foreign language, Oscar winners, underground comedy, martial arts, even puppet animation. This place has everything.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/23/2015
STEVE JOBS * *
Starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jeff Daniels. Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. Directed by Danny Boyle.
“The Boss says that ‘in a record store everybody’s your friend for twenty minutes.’ Hanks fumbles a bit trying to convey the company’s convoluted financial collapse. But All Things Must Pass is something special when it’s conjuring Springsteen’s sentiment, fondly recalling a time when buying music was a communal activity and not just clicking on things.” – Movie Mezzanine, 10/23/2015
“Daldry has no idea how to reconcile the mischievous, boys’ adventure spirit with his needlessly prolonged sequences of police brutality and child abuse. The violence is all out of proportion to the tone of the story, and I daresay I’ve never seen an entire village burnt to the ground to so little affect in a film before. Even the villagers don’t seem to mind.” – Movie Mezzanine, 10/09/2015
THE WALK * * 1 / 2
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Charlotte Le Bon, James Badge Dale, Steve Valentine and Ben Kingsley. Screenplay by Robert Zemeckis and Christopher Browne. Directed by Robert Zemeckis.
THE INTERN * * *
Starring Robert De Niro, Anne Hathaway, Anders Holm, Andrew Rannells and Rene Russo. Written and directed by Nancy Meyers.
“Short on incident but terribly long on portentous brooding, The Keeping Room feels like 1970’s grindhouse rape-splotiaton fare tarted up with modern prestige picture delusions of grandeur. Substituting dread for suspense, it’s an exceedingly difficult movie to sit through, and offers little reward for doing so.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/24/2015
“GoodFellas is one of the great sustained acts of virtuosity in American cinema, the artistry so in-your-face and swaggering that even a fifteen-year-old kid who only knew what he was talking about half the time could see the man behind the curtain working the levers, and that made it all the more thrilling. I finally understood what it meant for a movie to be directed.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/21/2015
“The white suit, that lighted dance floor, the strut — so many tropes have become part of our shared pop iconography that a lot folks tend to just assume they’ve seen the movie at some point, if only through cultural osmosis. Here’s a good way to tell for sure: If you’re laughing derisively about it, you haven’t watched Saturday Night Fever recently.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 09/21/2015
“There’s no arc to the story, just bullet-points over two decades. Whitey killed a lot of people and got away with it until he didn’t anymore. The filmmakers have no angle, no larger themes. The depositions haven’t been sculpted into drama. It’s a dull recitation of tired material that will feel like the Stations of the Cross to anyone who reads The Boston Herald.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/18/2015
SPLICED PERSONALITY 