JERSEY BOYS  * *

Starring John Lloyd Young, Vincent Piazza, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda and Christopher Walken. Screenplay by Marshall Brickman and Nick Elice. Directed by Clint Eastwood.

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“Despite running more than two hours, the film feels like it’s missing at least 40 minutes, with years passed over by Clooney’s stopgap afterthought of a narration. The only real connective tissue is Alexandre Desplat’s rousing retro score, which like all great World War II movie music contains a fair amount of whistling.” – The Improper Bostonian, 02/19/2014

“A spectacularly awful film. Breathtaking to behold as it barrels from one terrible artistic decision to another, Labor Day is so histrionically abysmal that it makes you realize how lazy and complacent most other movies are in their banal mediocrity. The atrociousness is thrilling. As I left the theater, I felt alive again.” – The Improper Bostonian, 02/05/2014

“Since little in the movie is explained aloud and the performances so restrained, The Invisible Woman must rely on compositions and blocking to express what the characters cannot. Far more attentive to visual storytelling than most actors who step behind the camera, Fiennes conveys shifting dynamics through positions within the frame.” – The Improper Bostonian, 01/22/2014

“These people are looking for accountability, which is all but impossible to find in this quagmire of corruption. Whitey sometimes feels a bit jumbled, as the two-hour-and-ten-minute running time probably isn’t enough to adequately address the full madness of this tragedy. But the film asks the right questions, and it seethes with a righteous furor.” – The Boston Herald, 01/19/2014

“Awards have a way of ruining everything, and thus a severely truncated, flattened and defanged August: Osage County is now being presented to movie audiences as a collection of Academy-friendly, For Your Consideration meltdown clips. Sigh, what I wouldn’t give to see a bare-bones Friedkin adaptation.” – The Improper Bostonian, 01/08/2014

“The entire film is easily summed up in the image of a horny fat-cat slapping repeatedly her in the face with a stack of cash, demanding that she prostitute herself simply because he can afford it. A Touch of Sin is a grueling experience, one that feels sadly necessary.” – EntertainmentTell, 01/02/2014

“The Wolf Of Wall Street might be Martin Scorsese’s funniest movie. It’s also his angriest. A marathon of depravity, the film’s gargantuan three-hour running-time becomes part of the joke. The relentless vulgarity feels heroic. It’s all too much too-much-ness about people for whom too much was never enough.” – EntertainmentTell, 12/24/2013

“Inside Llewyn Davis is my favorite movie in years. It’s the Coens’ most melancholic reverie, ditching their usual clockwork plotting for a loosey-goosey collection of anecdotes that only reveal themselves to be impeccably structured in retrospect. Like all of the Coen brothers’ movies, this one demands and rewards repeat viewings.” – The Improper Bostonian, 12/18/2013 

“A crassly calculated attempt to expand the brand to a wider audience (see also: white people) and everybody is on their best behavior. But when you take away the weird tonal shifts and sudden eruptions of tragedy, cancer and sexual abuse that make Tyler Perry movies so fascinatingly bizarre, all you are left with is his terrible, terrible filmmaking.” – EntertainmentTell, 12/13/2013