”Garrone’s Gomorrah was distinguished by a deeply researched examination of mob mechanics. He’s taken the same approach here, culling the screenplay from actual experiences of Senegalese migrants. What’s most horrifying is not the brutal desert crossing, but rather the vicious underground economy that has sprung up around these needy travelers.” – North Shore Movies, 02/23/2024

“Forensic auteurism may be a fool’s errand with collaborators as close as the Coens, nevertheless I think we now know which brother wrote the dildo joke in Burn After Reading. Drive-Away Dolls is a filthy, high-spirited farce that presumably sets some sort of record for the number of sex toys featured in a film released by a major studio subsidiary.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/22/2024

“It became a joke among my friends last year that nobody was surprised I loved a movie about an old-fashioned film enthusiast who listens to a lot of Lou Reed and reads paperback books in bars. (I don’t clean toilets for a living, but I did have to review Madame Web.) Still, it wasn’t so funny when Perfect Days was almost one of the last films this critic ever saw.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/21/2024

“A picaresque road trip through a country that has lost its common cause. And a lot of its common sense. This bracing, nervy comedy about our collapsing societal infrastructure follows a little girl lost in a post-MAGA America that’s a carnival of subcultures all siloed off from one another. It’s a place where everybody’s talking, but only to themselves.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/15/2024

“Garbage, reminiscent of the fly-by-night comic flicks companies like New Line used to crank out in the nineties. But honestly, I’d rather sit through one of these Sony B-movie bootlegs than another bloated, 165-minute Marvel epic that cost $200 million and wastes a cast full of Academy Award winners and then everyone gets mad if you don’t pretend like it’s a real movie.” – North Shore Movies, 02/15/2024

“A story of true love and fine cuisine, if not always in that order. It’s a film about fleeting pleasures to be savored in the moment, before they’re gone forever. The Taste Of Things is a sumptuous visual experience — you’ve never seen food photographed like this — following two lovers from the kitchen to the bedroom. But the kitchen is where the action happens.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/12/2024

“It could easily have been a cautionary tale, but Walker has made something slipperier and a good deal sadder. She’s more interested in the aftermath, locking the camera onto McKenna-Bruce’s achingly expressive face as she dissociates on the dance floor. This is very much a cinematographer’s movie, evoking emotions through color and physical space.” – North Shore Movies, 02/09/2024

”Completed in 1971 but never released theatrically until now, David Schickele’s hybrid-documentary-slash-hangout-movie is a portrait of a place that was already gone by the time the film was finished. The movie drifts through semi-improvised dalliances and affairs, spending idle, languorous afternoons with San Francisco’s activist community.” – North Shore Movies, 02/09/2024

“The fun thing about Frederick Wiseman films is that during them I often find myself fascinated by subjects I normally couldn’t care less about, such as the brushing and temperature controlled bacterial cultivation of French cheese curds. (I don’t even like cheese.) It’s the attention and level of care that make this such a pleasurable way to spend four hours.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/08/2024

”This is confusing and distracting, yet oddly in keeping with the movie’s laborious dedication to prohibitively expensive reproductions of perfectly good things that already exist. Why bother with a real Beatles song or an actual shooting location when you can instead spend a fortune on a slightly unnerving digital simulacrum? I mean, look at that cat.” – North Shore Movies, 02/02/2024