“It’s a more tactile picture than most, concerned with cold mornings and cramped, permanently damp interiors. Dialogue and music are scarce, with an aggressive sound design dominated by rattlings of old houses, the dull roar of the ocean and howls of freezing winds. I paused the movie about halfway through to go put on a sweatshirt.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/03/2020
“Vinterberg explores the social structures in which boozing has become embedded with wry humor and a great deal of ambivalence. Carrying a lighthearted, libertine kick, Another Round captures the loose, low-key euphoria you feel somewhere around the end of your second beer, and isn’t it funny how the problems always seem to start after the third one.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/02/2020
“Stardust is a David Bowie movie for people who hate David Bowie, demeaning and debasing the artist’s life and process in overly explanatory, sitcom vignettes and boring, biopic clichés that have little to do with what actually happened and even less to do with rock n’ roll. It’s like if Bohemian Rhapsody and Green Book had a really ugly baby.” – North Shore Movies, 12/01/2020
“One yearns for the knotty moral complexity directors like Kathryn Bigelow and Clint Eastwood brought to similar battlefield stories. Mosul, however, is a rah-rah revenge picture with a fist-pumping finale, the freshness of its Iraqi setting and Arab actors a smokescreen for the oldest, moldiest formula in the Hollywood handbook: This time it’s personal.” – North Shore Movies, 12/01/2020
“Ron Howard’s horrendous adaptation is a staggeringly inauthentic attempt at cornpone melodrama that plays like this year’s Cats, except with screaming rednecks instead of singing strays. These characters aren’t inhabited so much as they are placed on display like zoo animals for further study. Whatever’s happening here, it isn’t empathy.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/24/2020
“Allegedly the protagonist, Beth gets lost in the crowd of characters. Fine performers like Lois Smith, Judy Greer and Margo Martindale are stuck sitting around the living room with little to do, the latter seemingly only here because I think there’s some sort of law that you aren’t allowed to make a movie like this without Margo Martindale.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/24/2020
“I’d gone into this picture totally cold, with no foreknowledge even of the premise and I don’t say this often, but would recommend that others do the same. Collective is an important movie for a lot of reasons but it’s also one hell of a yarn, packing more plot twists than a paperback thriller, albeit stranger and much scarier than fiction.” – North Shore Movies, 11/23/2020
“As is the case with most late-period Allen pictures, A Rainy Day In New York is much better directed than written. The flaws are all right there on the surface but its virtues run somewhere deeper. It’s infused with a melancholy longing for a lost era that we know never existed in the first place, yet yearn for all the same. I like it more than I probably should.” – North Shore Movies, 11/19/2020
“There’s really no possible way to overstate how alienating and bizarre the opening ten minutes of this program are, just watching the Wookiees putter around and moan. It’s so anti-entertaining as to border on the avant-garde. Carrie Fisher claimed she had one of the only extant original copies and used to put it on at parties, when she wanted people to leave.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/16/2020
“Our cultural associations with Mel Gibson have become so unpleasant in recent years that casting him as a miserable asshole Santa Claus is a gag so good there’s probably no way any movie could do it justice. Putting the snarling nastiness of Gibson’s present-day, walking-cigarette-butt persona in the service of jolly sentiments is a joke that writes itself.” – North Shore Movies, 11/13/2020
SPLICED PERSONALITY 