“Copping some neat mid-century modern looks from Mad Men, but with contemporary hairstyles and idioms so as not to alienate youngsters, it’s the MCU’s usual M.O. of staying grounded in a deliberately drab, everyday reality. These muted Pop Art colors don’t even pop, because the last thing you’d want from a Fantastic Four movie is for things to get too fantastical.” – North Shore Movies, 07/22/2025

“More of a mood than a movie, conjuring the weirdly sluggish banality of life during an emergency – the way the whole world seems to be hurrying up to wait – as well as the odd resignation with which we humans are adapting to our ongoing climate catastrophe. It has a kind of hazy, languorous vibe that’s keyed into the Florida humidity and hot rain.” – North Shore Movies, 07/18/2025

“Eddington has something to offend (or annoy) just about everybody. The movie skewers sacred cows and picks low-hanging fruit, offering bluntly amusing sights like a young white girl lecturing a Black cop about systemic oppression, or Phoenix with a campaign sign that reads: ‘Your being manipulated.’ Aster is trying to cram in all the absurdity of our recent history.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/17/2025

“Basically a Guardians Of The Galaxy movie in different costumes, with everyone being breezily nonchalant around garishly colored space creatures and indulging in occasional flights of po-faced sentimentality. But what works in the Marvel quip factory doesn’t mesh with the Man of Steel. There’s no awe in this Superman, no magnificence.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/10/2025

“The deathless dinosaur franchise is now on its seventh installment, a breezily uninspired piece of hackwork that passes past our eyes with a shrug. Director Gareth Edwards brings a rote semi-professionalism to the proceedings. ‘How many more times are we gonna do this?’ are the first words you hear in Jurassic World Rebirth. It’s a valid question.” – North Shore Movies, 07/03/2025

“An uncommonly astute and sometimes shockingly funny movie about the numbing aftereffects of trauma, that sticky sense of stasis while the rest of the world moves on without you. Situated in a perpetual present tense, Eva Victor’s hugely accomplished debut isn’t a film about The Bad Thing, but about how life goes on before, after and all around it.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/02/2025

“This is not a movie designed to surprise you. The pleasures lie in the confidence with which it hits the familiar beats, moving gracefully between set-pieces and montages while doodling character flourishes in the margins of tried and true formulas. There’s something comforting about how completely in command Kosinski and company are of their cliches.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/26/2025

“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