”While it was admittedly idiotic of me to go looking for ideas in a $180 million Disney movie, for that price one should expect at least a modicum of craft. And on that level Brave New World is a catastrophe. This is an appalling-looking film, shot in TV standard medium closeups with a smear of fake film grain spackled over the image like an ugly Instagram filter.” – North Shore Movies, 02/14/2025

“You’ve got to have a lot of confidence to come up with a scene like that. But then it’s not surprising that Tøndel has got such swagger, given that he’s the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann. Armand is awesomely audacious and drunk on its own technique, though sometimes you might wish there was a bit more to the movie than audacity alone.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/13/2025

“There are worse ways to spend two hours than listening to Led Zeppelin songs being blasted through an IMAX sound system, where the rhythm section’s bottom-heavy bombast rattles the walls. It’s also hard not to feel some affection for these kindly grandpas sitting around the library, wistfully reminiscing about when they used to wield the hammer of the gods.” – North Shore Movies, 02/07/2025

”The film depicts the dehumanizing process by which people are forced to watch helplessly as their homes and schools are bulldozed. It asks that we watch, too. I get why No Other Land might sound like a tough sell. But the thing about excellent films is that they deserve to be seen, even if the filmmakers have to bring them around from theater to theater themselves.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/06/2025

“The steady, level-headed gaze of I’m Still Here is never as dramatically satisfying as you want it to be. It’s only in brief interludes, like at a restaurant where Eunice watches families dining together the way hers never will again, that Torres allows us to glimpse the full scale of the character’s heartbreak. The rest of the time there’s too much to do. Life goes on.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/31/2025

”Crap, but not in that fun, meathead January genre movie way that provides cool counter-programming to all the Oscar nominees. It’s chintzy trash made by faded stars who are slumming. Flight Risk is incompetent hackwork, directed without attention or purpose. It’s not even gratuitously violent, which I thought was the whole point of a Mel Gibson movie.” – North Shore Movies, 01/24/2025

”Scenes play out in single, unbroken takes as the spectral spectator drifts up and down the stairs, darting in and out of bedrooms. If nothing else, it’s an incredible feat of athleticism by the 62-year-old camera operator. I got tired just watching some of these shots. Presence is a gimmick movie with a great gimmick. Too bad about the ‘movie’ part.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/23/2025

“It’s a brilliant device, externalizing how the performer sees himself as a dancing monkey. (I know a chimp is an ape, not a monkey, but we don’t need to be pedantic about it. This is why nobody likes Neil deGrasse Tyson.) Celebrity makes people strange and sets them apart from others. Crowds can’t help but stare, the way they would at a chimp wearing a tuxedo.” – North Shore Movies, 01/17/2025

“Thick with the heavy, gun-metal austerity of films like Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and Todd Field’s Tár, The Brutalist sometimes feels like a director trying to will a masterpiece into being. Corbet very nearly gets there. The filmmaking hums with purpose and import, paced at a marvelously brisk clip. The textures and scale of the movie are astonishing.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/09/2025

”The first half of Hard Truths winds up Pansy and sends her blasting away with motormouth jags and pity any poor shopkeepers, grocery clerks or innocent bystanders who happen to get in the way. Some of these scenes, such as a sidesplitting riff on baby clothes, feel like they could be from a British Afro-Caribbean version of Curb Your Enthusiasm.” – North Shore Movies, 01/09/2025