”This is confusing and distracting, yet oddly in keeping with the movie’s laborious dedication to prohibitively expensive reproductions of perfectly good things that already exist. Why bother with a real Beatles song or an actual shooting location when you can instead spend a fortune on a slightly unnerving digital simulacrum? I mean, look at that cat.” – North Shore Movies, 02/02/2024
”With the help of Mean Streets cinematographer Kent Wakeford and editor Marcia Lucas, Alice has a roving, wobbly visual technique, the unsettled camera evoking the characters’ uncertain living situations. It’s more volatile than you’d expect from a story like this, scenes abruptly exploding into laughter or tears as befitting an exhausted mom’s mood swings.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/02/2024
”Arthur was typically cast as a tightly-wound professional coming charmingly unglued by her male co-stars and the chaotic circumstances surrounding her. What made her heroines unique was that they never seemed diminished, even when falling to pieces. These weren’t shrews to be tamed, but rather independent women blossoming into their best selves.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/01/2024
My second dispatch from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Nathan Silver’s Between The Temples, Josh Margolin’s Thelma and India Donaldson’s Good One.
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My first dispatch from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, Michael John Warren’s Lolla: The Story Of Lollapalooza and Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions.
”What’s unexpected, and undeniably amusing, is that these kids curse like sailors, spitting Scarface volumes of profanity on the field. This is presumably why The Underdoggs has gone straight to streaming, so underage viewers won’t have to worry about sneaking into an R-rated movie and can watch it as easily as they watch porn on their phones.” – North Shore Movies, 01/25/2024
”Supporting characters only exist to tell us how important Isabel Wilkerson is, how the world needs her work, and her voice. Even people on their deathbeds don’t get to talk about anything except how much this book is going to matter. The constant affirmations of the author’s ego aren’t just dramatically inert, they also overwhelm her ideas, sucking up all the screen time.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/25/2024
”It can also be seen as the codification of Pacino’s movie star persona, the first time he started treating that magnificent head of hair as a co-headliner and when his squeaky Michael Corleone whisper got gruff. The ending of the film is the beginning of the broadly theatrical, ‘LOUD-quiet-LOUD’ monologues that became the actor’s signature, for better and worse.” – Crooked Marquee, 01/19/2024
“There’s a perfectly lovely two-hander here about an elderly woman and a middle-aged man opening up to one another over the course of a daylong drive. The Proustian allusion in the title is entirely intentional, as this is very much a remembrance of things past. The problem is that the movie keeps pulling away from what’s so compelling about the present.” – North Shore Movies, 01/19/2024
”What’s grimly funny is how the character’s sensitive, do-gooder liberalism consistently backfires on her. Mrs. Nowak isn’t particularly subtle nor even incorrect about regarding her fellow teachers as fascists and thugs, yet she’s the one whose actions keep making a bad situation worse. What was that again about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions?” – North Shore Movies, 01/19/2024
SPLICED PERSONALITY 