“Ari Aster’s monstrously funny exercise in antagonizing the audience is smarty-pants sophisticated and crassly juvenile, often at the same time. It’s a surreal Oedipal saga in the spirit of gonzo, early 1970’s provocations like Where’s Poppa? and Little Murders. The movie is mean-spirited, deeply unpleasant and I laughed myself sick. Your mileage may vary.” – North Shore Movies, 04/28/2023

“Like Fede Alvarez’s inexplicable 2013 Evil Dead, director Lee Cronin’s reboot-redux-whatever has no patience for the zany Bruce Campbell antics of Raimi’s original trilogy, playing the knowingly silly mythology boringly straight. This is one of the more baffling creative decisions in franchise-era filmmaking. It’s like remaking Airplane! as Zero Hour.” – North Shore Movies, 04/23/2023

“It’s especially disappointing because Dracula is deliciously played by Cage as a lip-smacking sequel to his career-defining turn in the 1988 cult classic Vampire’s Kiss. He’s a haughty, imperious Count with a dismissive disgust for us mere mortals. He’s also only in about 25 minutes of the movie, which strikes me as a staggering misallocation of resources.” – North Shore Movies, 04/14/2023

“A fun movie to watch. So much fun, it took until about halfway home for me to begin bristling at how neatly Goldhaber has stacked the deck. Our heroes somehow come up with a scheme in which they can blow this thing sky high without anybody getting hurt, nor any environmentally damaging spillage. The audience remains unchallenged throughout.” – North Shore Movies, 04/14/2023

“Funny in such a reserved, bone-dry fashion that half the audience will probably spend the movie wondering what the rest of us are laughing at. This is an expertly conducted symphony of passive-aggression, a portrait of a milieu where everyone fancies themselves too tolerant and enlightened to admit how exasperated they are with each other.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/13/2023

“For nearly thirty years, the Dardennes have been telling stories about characters struggling on the margins. When you’re desperate and poor, life takes place in the present tense, and so the films move from one immediate obstacle to another. Occasionally, there is a fleeting moment of grace; an unexpected act of tenderness. Or in this case, a song.” – North Shore Movies, 04/07/2023

“Enormously entertaining and maybe just a little bit evil, Ben Affleck’s Air is about how a humble $100 million corporation became a behemoth worth billions, a miracle of marketing the film treats as a triumph of the human spirit. This anatomy of a celebrity endorsement is an underdog sports movie without the sports. And without the underdogs.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/04/2023

“Wears its world-building with a refreshingly light touch, sending the spry cast on a semi-nonsensical trek through a whole host of half-explained medieval fantasy tropes, interrupted by massive, impersonal effects sequences that stop the film dead in its tracks. A cheaper, chintzier version of this movie might have been as much fun as these actors appear to be having.” – North Shore Movies, 03/31/2023

“This is some serious Marvin Berry shit, depicting artists like The Isley Brothers, Gladys Knight and Donna Summer as medium-talent rubes headed nowhere until this smooth-talking white boy sauntered into the studio and showed them how it’s done. Aside from being incredibly offensive to anybody who cares about this music, the movie is also terrible.” – North Shore Movies, 03/30/2023

“The movie’s massiveness is part of the joke, its sheer scale the stuff of absurdist comedy. By the time we get to Paris, the overkill attains a giddy, orgiastic grandeur. Walter Hill’s The Warriors is restaged as exquisitely orchestrated automotive mayhem, then one-upped by a Buster Keaton-worthy stunt on a stubborn flight of stairs. They even borrow from Barry Lyndon.” – North Shore Movies, 03/24/2023