”One should never underestimate the entertainment value of old biddies saying swears. A pleasantly amusing trifle, Wicked Little Letters is one of those quirky English village comedies that used to play for months on end at the Coolidge or West Newton back before the audience for this sort of thing started staying home and streaming television shows instead.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/04/2024

”An innocuous, family adventure film with too many characters and a severe shortage of jokes. Nobody is given anything especially funny to say, but these are skilled performers who can recite placeholder dialogue with comic intonations that occasionally trick your ear into thinking you’ve heard something clever. This is kind of Rudd’s whole deal as an actor.” – North Shore Movies, 03/20/2024

”Rowdy Herrington’s original Road House remains one of the finest of aged ‘80s cheeses. The greatest movie ever directed by someone named Rowdy, it is a film completely comfortable in its own absurdity. By contrast, the remake is uneasy, skittish even. Liman can’t settle on a consistent tone. It’s always either trying too hard or undercutting itself.” – North Shore Movies, 03/19/2024

”A freaky-deaky film noir steeped in body horror and bodily fluids, it’s a sicko comic cross between the Coen brothers and David Cronenberg. Love Lies Bleeding starts out like one of those rural neo-noirs from the era in which it is set, lifting elements from Blood Simple and At Close Range before blossoming into something much stranger and all its own.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/14/2024

“There are six credited screenwriters on Peter Farrelly’s latest picture, as well at two more writers credited with the story. That’s a lot of paychecks for a script that feels like it was knocked out in an afternoon. As a critic who has expressed a preference for the filmmaker’s earlier, funnier movies, Ricky Stanicky serves as a reminder to be careful what you wish for.” – North Shore Movies, 03/08/2024

”And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time before I see another film as stubbornly soporific as Netflix’s dreary sci-fi drama Spaceman. There’s about 20 minutes of story here stretched out to nearly two hours, the movie idling alongside the spacecraft. This is the gloomiest, most humorless Sandler picture yet, and I’m including the one about 9/11.” – North Shore Movies, 02/29/2024

”A cavalcade of gags and stunts with the zany cartoon logic of Bugs and company at their best, flinging the characters around in antic set pieces that first defy the laws of physics then play them for unexpected payoffs. Shot in high contrast black-and-white, the movie has the undercranked aesthetic of an old-timey silent short revved up for TikTok attention spans.” – North Shore Movies, 02/29/2024

”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