“Kids are expensive. 79-year-old Robert De Niro just had another one, his seventh. Alimonies aren’t cheap either, nor I imagine are property taxes when you own half the hotels and restaurants in lower Manhattan. What I’m saying is that the guy’s got serious overhead and About My Father is a painless enough way for a beloved actor to pay some bills.” – North Shore Movies, 05/26/2023

“Palladoro avoids the cathartic arguments that usually fuel this kind of family drama. Instead, he’s content to just be with these people, sitting alongside them and observing, mostly in moments of repose. At times, Monica feels like a movie made up of all the stuff other movies cut out. This unconventional approach yields unexpected rewards.” – North Shore Movies, 05/26/2023

“An accumulation of lived experience is felt over the film’s 147 minutes, eschewing melodrama in favor of meaningful gestures and knowing nods. But the repetitiveness of the Same Time, Next Year scenario becomes a bit of a chore as the characters enter into middle age. There’s some excellent filmmaking on display here. There’s also an awful lot of it.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/25/2023

“A deliberately outrageous provocation, Master Gardener seems designed to stir up the kind of social media discourse that will make you throw your phone into the ocean. But then, that’s always been this director’s deal. If Scorsese is cinema culture’s beloved grandpa, Schrader’s the irascible uncle who says amusingly inappropriate things during holiday dinners.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/18/2023

“A pretty good explainer as to why most things you buy now are crap, BlackBerry dramatizes the collapse of the once-ubiquitous handheld device as a cautionary tale of tech bro hubris and the inevitable consequences of a growth-at-all-costs mentality. Interestingly ambivalent and scabrously funny, it’s an inverted Social Network for also-rans.” – North Shore Movies, 05/16/2023

“The beauty of Blume’s book is that it tackles big issues without making a big deal out of them. Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig smartly preserves that sense of proportion, keeping the movie grounded in believable, day-to-day interactions and lived-in 1970s-era details. To Margaret, these events feel tumultuous. To us, they’re wonderfully ordinary.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/28/2023

“With testimonials from the likes of Molly Ringwald and Lena Dunham, the guest list skews female for obvious reasons. But the filmmakers miss out on what a game-changer Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t was for little boys who had been so ashamed of what they were doing under the covers at night. Not that I would know anything about that.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/28/2023

“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