“Veering off into incoherent espionage techno-thriller territory, it feels like they decided to just shoot the notes from a brainstorming session instead of going to the trouble of turning them into a screenplay. Promising ideas are picked up and discarded minutes later, as if trying to cram in a bunch of crappy sequels at once. Like most upgrades, it’s full of bugs.” – North Shore Movies, 06/25/2025

“The second sequel to Danny Boyle’s 2003 zombie shocker is the first chapter of a new trilogy, so it spends a galling amount of screen time setting up later installments. This is frustrating because there’s some really good stuff in here – a lot of it quite beautiful and strange – but none of it has been arranged into the rising and descending action of a story. It’s just stuff.” – North Shore Movies, 06/20/2025

“This is so idiotic one hardly knows where to begin. The Life Of Chuck is a two-hour barrage of soft-focus smiles, vaguely mystical, New Age noodling, and gaseous platitudes about carpe-ing the diem, etc. The characters speak to each other in such meaningless aphorisms, Flanagan’s dialogue sounds like a gangbang in the greeting card aisle.” – North Shore Movies, 06/14/2025

“Song is trying to take the heightened genre conventions and bring them back down to Earth. Materialists is too high-minded a movie to come up with a contrived misunderstanding that results in a classic rom-com, running-through-the-airport ending. But without that kind of corny catharsis, the film doesn’t end so much as it deflates into the closing credits.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/12/2025

“It may sound strange to describe a Wes Anderson film as the summer’s most delightful action-comedy. Missing the usual Anderson undercurrents of grief and melancholy, it’s more gag-based than anything he’s done in ages, with an early bit involving a plane’s ejector seat so exquisitely timed it caused me to make a spectacle of myself at the press screening.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/05/2025

“Remember those straight-to-video spin-offs that used to clog the shelves at your local Blockbuster, offering the cheaper and less star-studded continuing adventures of Tremors, From Dusk ‘Till Dawn or American Pie Presents? The blatantly lousy Ballerina is not so much beating a dead horse as it’s making sure all the parts have been ground up for dog food.” – North Shore Movies, 06/05/2025

“This is a movie about a beautiful woman on a big shitty boat trying to fight off a psycho who wants to make her a meal for sharks, and the filmmakers understand that this premise is enough. At a time when so many horror films have been overthought into tedious dissertations, it’s a relief to find one that has nothing on its mind beyond showing you a good time.” – North Shore Movies, 06/05/2025

“Danny and Michael Philippou’s gnarly Hansel And Gretel riff follows two grieving step-siblings in the hands of a sinister foster mother played to the hilt by Sally Hawkins. In most movies like this when you’re supposed to believe a child is in danger, a part of you knows that the filmmakers wouldn’t dare kill off a little kid. These dudes would totally kill a little kid.” – North Shore Movies, 05/30/2025

“The thing about Irishmen is that they’re really good at telling stories, and whenever Bono tones down the airy abstractions and gets rooted in the specific, the movie becomes quite winning. The best parts involve the superstar’s fraught relationship with his emotionally withholding father. Get an Irish guy going about their Da and it’s gonna be a teary evening.” – North Shore Movies, 05/29/2025

“An unseemly amount of the dialogue in The Final Reckoning is like Baldwin’s ‘living manifestation of destiny’ speech, except not played for laughs. There are films about the life of Christ that spend less time proclaiming the divinity of their protagonist. Yet just like in the movies, right when all seems lost, Cruise miraculously comes through.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/22/2025