”Better than it probably should be but still not very good. There’s a comfort food quality to this stroll down memory lane. It feels like one of those sitcom reunion movies that networks used to produce back in the ‘80s, coasting on familiar faces and a catchy theme song. It’ll play best on Netflix, where most people will be watching it while doing something else.” – North Shore Movies, 07/02/2024

”Rushed and overwritten, with West constantly putting the cart before the horse to shoehorn as many homages and semiotic asides as he can cram into a given scene. But such self-reflexive wankery only goes so far unless you’ve got something to say, and MaXXXine is one of those movies that confuses talking about big ideas with actually having them.” – North Shore Movies, 07/01/2024

”What’s refreshing is that there aren’t any overt lessons being learned here. This trip isn’t going to change either of their lives, no matter how bad the traffic. What Hall’s film captures is something far more important and elusive. It’s about how an unexpected human connection, even one as fleeting as a cab ride, can deepen the way we see the world around us.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/27/2024

“As with Baker’s plays, the silences are long and the dialogue oblique. Janet Planet can occasionally be a frustrating picture. The playwright’s penchant for real-time longueurs doesn’t always translate as well to the screen as it plays onstage, where being boring on purpose carries with it an entirely different electricity. But the movie has a canny, cumulative effect.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/27/2024

“Nichols’ heavily fictionalized adaptation plays up the romantic grandeur of Lyon’s photographs, his camera caressing the brooding visage of Austin Butler as a reckless ne’er-do-well so stupid he instigates a police chase and then runs out of gas. It’s a pretty good metaphor for the movie itself, which is full of striking images that never really go anywhere.” – North Shore Movies, 06/21/2024

“Boomer rock docs have calcified into such a boilerplate, bulletproof formula that as a critic I often have trouble finding anything to say about them. If you like the artist, you’ll enjoy the movie. But even die-hard fans might find Disciple a bit excessive. Do we really need a 147-minute documentary about the third-best guitarist in the E Street Band?” – North Shore Movies, 06/21/2024

”The inchoate animosity against the Brat Pack that I feel like McCarthy is trying to pin down here was a resentment that the surplus of teen-focused entertainments in the 1980s signified Hollywood’s shift away from adult-oriented material. It goes without saying that nobody in the documentary dares to bring up the fact that most of these movies just weren’t very good.” – North Shore Movies, 06/14/2024

”Sennott is sensational, mapping out the fractured defense mechanisms of a person who’s only comfortable expressing herself through comedy and dark jokes, suddenly stuck in a situation that really isn’t funny anymore. In fact, she’s so good you’ll find herself getting angry at the movie for undercutting her work with the pointless jigsaw puzzle structure.” – North Shore Movies, 06/14/2024

”While it feels gross to discuss a young woman’s directorial debut with comparisons to her famous father, it appears that as far as handsomely shot hooey with a side of treacly humanism goes, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I kept wishing The Watchers had been more stylistically distinctive from her dad’s work, so I could feel like a better ally.” – North Shore Movies, 06/07/2024

”There are too many terrific actors in Ezra for the movie to be terrible, but that’s not for lack of trying. A cloying disability drama that feels like it was written two or three decades ago, it bounds from one queasy cliché to another like the most divorced dad fantasy ever. Thanks to the performers, this isn’t a difficult movie to watch, but it leaves an icky aftertaste.” – North Shore Movies, 05/31/2024