“This very funny, semi-autobiographical debut feature from writer-director Karen Maine is about an uptight Catholic schoolgirl trying to make sense of her new downstairs yearnings. There are a lot of bawdy coming-of-age movies but you won’t find many this gentle and sweet. It’s the warmest, fuzziest film I’ve ever seen about masturbating to internet porn.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/23/2020

“Philandering houseguests discovering cameras in their showerheads is actually a pretty good hook for a sicko comedy––one dreams of what Brian De Palma might have done with it––but Franco’s directorial debut is swallowed up in the gloom of Christian Sprenger’s underexposed cinematography. Some movies are hard to watch, this one’s hard to see.” – North Shore Movies, 07/23/2020

“Initially I was worried that with such a thrillingly dunderheaded title Money Plane would be another winking exercise in fatuousness, a movie made to be meme’d. So I was flooded with relief during the film’s opening moments to find this is no smarmy, meta-exercise in self-mockery, but rather a feat of genuine incompetence. It comes by its crappiness honestly.” – North Shore Movies, 07/22/2020

“The Painted Bird is about how war dehumanizes and destroys everything it touches. It crushes spirits and forces people to become their worst possible selves. As a culture we cling to the myth that suffering somehow ennobles people and turns them into better human beings, when mostly it just makes them mean. Some stories are supposed to hurt.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/16/2020

“Hanks has developed at least a dozen different ways of narrowing his eyes, and he subtly shows us everything the commander would never dare say out loud. Without making a big fuss over it, Greyhound is a movie about life-and-death decisions that must be made in split-seconds. We watch how heavily they weigh on heroes.” – North Shore Movies, 07/10/2020

“This affable Groundhog Day knockoff is a genially mediocre time-killer that feels a lot more at home on your television set than it did on a big screen. I suppose like a lot of streaming titles Palm Springs will play pleasantly in the background while you’re doing laundry, escaping any questions about how something so slight could have set records at Sundance.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/09/2020

“Metaphor alert! Relic is actually about the horrors of old age, with Edna’s encroaching dementia manifesting itself through supernatural means because otherwise this would be another Alzheimer’s movie and those are awfully hard to watch. It’s a good idea squandered in the frustratingly vague screenplay by James and her co-writer Christian White.” – North Shore Movies, 07/09/2020

“Hollering in a Noo Yawk accent even more outsized than his prosthetic pot belly, Gibson’s emphysematic, pistol-packin’ Archie Bunker is by far the best thing about the film, which becomes increasingly more absurd as the apartment building is swarmed by a tactical team of bland baddies looking for paintings stolen by the Nazis during WWII.” – North Shore Movies, 07/02/2020

“I’ve wrestled with whether or not I’m trivializing serious subject matter when I tell people I spent most of this movie on the edge of my seat. Thanks to the extraordinary access attained by France, we’re provided passenger seat views of daring midnight escapes and hair-raising trips through customs, with a percolating electronic score out of a Michael Mann picture.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/30/2020

“In synopsis I suppose some of these beats might sound familiar —repetitive even— but that’s because they are eternal. In its swooniest moments the movie conjures a breathless sense of heart-skipping hedonism, a first visit to the secret world of older girls and that feeling of the night opening up and stretching out forever with endless possibility.” – North Shore Movies, 06/25/2020