“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

“One of the highlights is a honey of a performance by Richard Roundtree as an old flame of Fonda’s trying to rekindle their relationship. These two have got killer chemistry, enough to make you wish we’d gotten to see Shaft and Barbarella knock boots back in the day. This might be the first time I’ve spent a movie rooting for two octogenarians to get it on.” – North Shore Movies, 03/18/2023

“What’s left is the not inconsiderable pleasure of a fearless performer pushing himself to the brink of madness, but I can name at least a dozen other, better movies in which Willem Dafoe also does that. Inside feels dilettantish and cheap, unable to decide what it wants to say and falling back on empty aphorisms like ‘art is destruction.’ Okay, whatever.” – North Shore Movies, 03/18/2023

“Matt Ruskin’s very 2023 take on the Albert DeSalvo killings re-imagines the story for a new generation as an anachronistic girl-power parable about a stubborn podcaster—oops, I mean reporter—who beats the old boys’ network and cracks the case on her own. The film may take place in the early 1960s, but it couldn’t be more tailored to today’s sensibilities.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/16/2023