”This revelation carries The Friend past a few false endings, and it’s the smartest thing about the film’s refusal to anthropomorphize Apollo. We may never be able to fully comprehend those we choose to share our lives with. In the end, people are as frustrating, complicated and essentially unknowable as another species altogether. But we can love them.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/03/2025

”Supposedly adapted from a novel by The Punisher writer Chuck Dixon, the screenplay by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone is an uncredited amalgam of Liam Neeson dad fantasies warmed over with sprinkles of Epstein QAnon seasoning and a lot of dolorous honor and duty stuff about the armed forces. It’s all pretty draggy, downcast and should have been a lot more fun.” – North Shore Movies, 03/27/2025

”It’s a Guiraudie movie without any onscreen sex, yet it’s the one in which characters are driven daffiest by their desires. Repression makes everything worse, it seems. Misericordia has a wicked sense of humor that sneaks up on you. It’s an uneasy, pokerfaced kind of comedy that thrives on the viewer stewing in discomfort over the increasingly amoral twists.” – North Shore Movies, 03/27/2025

”Director Burnett’s whimsical 1999 romance was long thought lost for good; a casualty of cruel critics, fickle distributors and the precarious indie film ecosystem. But thanks to the valiant rescue efforts of the good folks at Milestone Film and Video, a new 4K restoration of this quirky little charmer is finally seeing the light of a projector at the Brattle Theatre.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/26/2025

“A bizarre vanity project for Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, this baffling, tacky simulacrum of a prestige picture only makes sense as a bid for garden party respectability from the purveyor of Dr. Pimple Popper and MILF Manor. The Alto Knights is an almost unfathomably boring movie, so inert it feels like the film itself has achieved senescence.” – North Shore Movies, 03/21/2025

”It’s the best baseball movie since Bull Durham — or maybe Bad Lieutenant — because it explores this sport’s peculiar ability to bend and distort time. As the shadows on Soldiers Field get longer, an elegiac ache settles in. Eephus is more than a movie about a game, it’s about reaching a time in your life when it feels like it’s getting late earlier and earlier.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/13/2025

”A droll marriage comedy disguised as an espionage thriller, making clever and sometimes fiendishly funny use of Blanchett’s glamourpuss opacity. Good heavens, can she wear these clothes. Black Bag plays to Soderbergh’s strengths: it’s a classy, jazzy, clockwork contraption full of intricate plot machinery and great-looking movie stars doing movie star shit.” – North Shore Movies, 03/13/2025

”A kooky and digressive sci-fi allegory stew that finds the filmmaker indulging some of his silliest whims while burning through $150 million of Warner Bros. Discovery’s money. I have a soft spot for films like this, when auteurs are allowed to run amok with studio resources. There’s something exhilarating about watching an artist get goofy on such an expensive canvas.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/05/2025

”Burns’ beer commercial good looks have served him well in Hollywood rom-coms over the years, and here once again provide motivation for the filmmaker’s favorite themes:  (1.) ‘Look how many beautiful women want to sleep with Edward Burns’ and (2.) ‘These bitches sure are crazy.’ Yeah, it’s awkward sharing a surname with a filmmaker you think sucks.” – North Shore Movies, 02/21/2025

”The funniest movie I’ve seen in months. A marathon of sicko gallows humor that expands and expounds upon King’s short story in ways both irreverent and playfully profound, it’s a cathartically comic burlesque of gag-inducing set-pieces, rivaling the Final Destination films for Rube Goldberg death scenes. God help me, I laughed like a hyena.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/20/2025