“It is the month when we give thanks for leggy, duplicitous dames and doomed private dicks played for patsies. November is Noirvember, celebrating Hollywood’s hard-boiled fools for love and the frisky femme fatales that are their undoing, bringing back the best in cynical thrillers with bungled murder plots, bummer endings and sardonic voice-over narrations.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/04/2022
“The Outfit has been assembled with an unfussy expertise that seemed like no great shakes to film critics 49 years ago, but feels like a lost art today. Duvall is coiled like a cobra while big teddy bear Baker is expansive and gregarious. The latter basically steals the picture, lending considerable, cherubic warmth to the sometimes too-cool proceedings.” – Crooked Marquee, 11/04/2022
“Good lord, is Terrifier 2 disgusting. It’s also a blast, if you’re into this kind of thing. Thornton has a terrific physicality. There’s something silly about him, a lightness that makes the ridiculously extended dismemberments feel like an elaborate joke: a gag in both senses of the word. It’s all in good fun even while being one of the grossest movies ever made.” – North Shore Movies, 10/27/2022
“A wonderful movie about two ordinary people trying to do their best to muddle through everyday circumstances, with the humane acknowledgement that such things are tougher on some folks than others and an opportunity for transcendence in our quietest moments. Causeway is the kind of film we come to festivals like IFFBoston to see.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/25/2022
“Alan Parker’s scandalous supernatural thriller Angel Heart is scary as hell but also something of a hoot, with a mordant sense of humor and some of the genre’s greatest character names. The crooner is called Johnny Favorite, De Niro plays Louis Cyphre and there’s a jazz musician named Toots Sweet. Even the title turns out to be a terrible pun.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/24/2022
My second dispatch from the 60th annual New York Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, Maria Schrader’s She Said and Park Chan-wook’s Decision To Leave.
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“Rewritten by director Amy Holden Jones, the resulting picture is a fiendishly funny parody played completely straight. So straight that a lot of dismissive critics confused it with the genuine article. But then again, as a horny pubescent I rented the movie on VHS more than once for obvious reasons, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t in on the joke, either.” – Crooked Marquee, 10/21/2022
“McGregor still hasn’t figured out how to do an American accent, tripping over his over-enunciated R’s like they’re loose floorboards. He’s otherwise fine as the fussbudget brother to Hawke’s mercurial musician, the two actors suggesting a rich backstory for which Garcia’s schematic screenplay provides only the boldest of melodramatic strokes.” – North Shore Movies, 10/21/2022
“Ticket To Paradise feels like being handed a glass of water after a long walk across the desert. It’s lukewarm tap water and a little cloudy, but you’re grateful for it all the same. The picture coasts almost entirely on the charisma of its superstar leads and the massive amount of affection we in the audience have accrued for them over the years.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/20/2022
My first dispatch from the 60th annual New York Film Festival contains capsule reviews of Claire Denis’ Stars At Noon, Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s Personality Crisis: One Night Only and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle Of Sadness.
SPLICED PERSONALITY 