“More of a conversation-starter than an argument, asking questions for which there are no easy answers and playing upon our sympathies to trick the audience into interrogating our own personal permission structures. There’s nothing didactic about Tár, nor any simple moral you can hashtag or put on a bumper sticker. The film is complicated. Difficult.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/12/2022
“The whole point of going to a Dario Argento picture is to see the gorgeously operatic, over-the-top set-pieces. But while Arnaud Rebotini’s score finds an appropriately soaring 1980’s synth groove, the murky cinematography by Matteo Cocco is strictly amateur hour, offering none of the director’s trademark kinky colors or lurid camera movements.” – North Shore Movies, 10/12/2022
“These are the works of a merry prankster intoxicated by the possibilities of the medium, pushing at its limitations and discovering there are none. All three stories come to tragic ends, yet what we mostly remember is how funny and cool they are; full of absurdist asides and knowing nods, flights of sublime silliness amid stylish poses and half-kidding crime plots.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/10/2022
“A titillating semiotic exercise, sending up gender roles and inverting the vampire mythos with results both provocative and ridiculous. Foregrounding female desire while flipping the script on more than just the old vampire tropes about darkness and light, it’s a Dracula tale in which the count is a countess and Mina Harker happens to be a himbo.” – Crooked Marquee, 10/07/2022
“David O. Russell’s top-heavy, Prohibition-era farce lumbers down a very long runway without ever really taking flight. Reckless and sometimes quite silly, nothing about Amsterdam works, per se. And yet, there’s a loopy, eager energy to the picture that inspires a peculiar affection. It’s a blundering mess of a movie, but an endearing one.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/06/2022
“Judging from her first three movies, I still have no idea if writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour is capable of telling a straightforward story. I’m also not sure she’s particularly interested in doing so. The fiercely talented filmmaker is a dazzling designer of environments, creating luminous and dangerous spaces in which her archetypal characters can roam.” – North Shore Movies, 10/06/2022
“So many of the movie’s running gags are about how comfortably gay pop culture has become, including a mercilessly funny flashback to Bobby’s Queer Eye audition and a less successful Brokeback parody. These bits only amplify the disconnect between the picture’s posturing as a milestone and the feeling that it’s awfully late to the party.” – North Shore Movies, 10/02/2022
”It’s a perfect role for Sigourney Weaver, whose crisp, patrician air always seems to be keeping something wilder just barely in check. Directors Forbes and Wolodarsky try to liven things up by having her break the fourth wall and confide in the audience directly, a gimmick that’s been so abused on television as of late I’d be happy to see it retired for a while.” – North Shore Movies, 10/01/2022
“Gould scores with a spectacular array of beautiful women. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the movie is commenting on the character’s misogyny or reveling in it. Filed under stuff you would never see onscreen today: a purring, post-coital Bergen stroking his mustache with her toes, plus a comely coed seductively running her fingers thorough the hair on his shoulders.” – Crooked Marquee, 09/30/2022
“Plodding along in a bleary no man’s land between satire and sentimentality, Farrelly is too reverential of our boys in uniform to really reckon with that obscene conflict, settling for a po-faced acknowledgement that things ‘were complicated’ over there. It’s the most genial of war films, keeping the bloody violence (and the Vietnamese) almost entirely offscreen.” – North Shore Movies, 09/29/2022
SPLICED PERSONALITY 