“Jonsson is such a marvelous actor that his camaraderie with Hoffman elevates everything around them. These boys bantering and bonding on their journey can’t help but recall another King adaptation, Rob Reiner’s beloved Stand By Me. Except imagine a version of Stand By Me in which the kid from Jojo Rabbit gets his jaw blown off for walking too slow.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/09/2025

“The flatness of the onscreen spaces matches the characters’ deadpan lack of affect, conjuring a torpid sort of vacation-mode miasma that becomes beguiling. By the end, you can’t imagine the movie looking any other way. A melancholy undercurrent runs beneath all this poker-faced silliness, almost like Glander has made a Jim Jarmusch movie for little kids.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/04/2025

“A deliberate throwback to the kind of glib, trash-talking crime pictures that proliferated in the immediate post-Pulp Fiction era when Caught Stealing takes place. I lived in this same Alphabet City neighborhood back then, and the film feels very much like something I would have snuck into at the Village East after a matinee of Feeling Minnesota.” – North Shore Movies, 08/29/2025

“I’m not sure I’ve seen a project that more overtly typifies the corporate fanboy Alamo Drafthouse sensibility I find so off-putting, a celebration of genre in air quotes where everyone’s trying too hard to show what an awesome time they’re having. I say this all the time, but Alamo theaters are for people who wish going to the movies was more like Dave & Busters.” – North Shore Movies, 08/29/2025

“Ron Howard’s lurid, misanthropic melodrama follows a doomed collection of German expats trying to forge a new utopia in the Galapagos. There’s no need for snakes in this Eden when you’ve got such shitty neighbors. Campy and cruel, the movie is an unexpected hoot, showing off a naughty mean streak in Opie that would horrify Aunt Bee. I like him like this.” – North Shore Movies, 08/22/2025

“Too slapdash to get a handle on, like Coen and Cooke started shooting before they’d figured out what story they were trying to tell. There are some amusing moments, a few intriguing ideas and a knockout movie star performance from Margaret Qualley as an aloof, no-nonsense private eye. But almost nothing in the picture connects.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/21/2025

“As a tenured professor of film studies at NYU, Lee is appropriately reverential of the source material while also still a big enough goofball to pour tons of fun Spike stuff on top of it. The director’s hallmarks are all here: gravity-defying dolly shots; the swelling, horn-heavy score out of a 1940s melodrama; at least five endings; and incessant sports-related tomfoolery.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/14/2025

“A lot of confident technique adding up to very little, Cregger’s follow-up to his fiendishly entertaining Barbarian plays with the same sort of hairpin plot curves and abrupt, left-field perspective shifts. But Weapons is a gloomier and more muddled affair. If this guy ever decides to make a movie that’s about something, he’s gonna knock it out of the park.” – North Shore Movies, 08/08/2025

“Ebulliently silly, awash in bright colors and sunny Los Angeles locations. Gen Z’s eye-rolling disdain for their embarrassing elders provides the comic motor of this often very funny film, and having grown accustomed to being on the receiving end of such withering glares, I think I might have enjoyed the movie even more than my niece did.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/07/2025

“Sandler doesn’t star in these movies anymore so much as he hosts them, graciously ceding the stage to his guests and trying to make sure everyone has a good time. Nearly half-an-hour longer than the original, Happy Gilmore 2 is an amiable, undisciplined shambles so good-natured it’s hard not to enjoy even when the jokes fall flat. Geniality goes a long way.” – North Shore Movies, 07/25/2025