“Even if the film’s depiction of neurodivergence will never be mistaken for sensitive, one must at least appreciate the audacity. The Old Way gropes around at some promising ideas, but the movie is cut too close to the bone to get much mileage out of these concepts, pulling back to meat-and-potatoes genre beats whenever things threaten to get really interesting.” – North Shore Movies, 01/12/2023

“Producers Roman Coppola and Gillian Jacobs present a movie assembled by eight different writer-director teams working independently of one another. As an experiment, it’s not uninteresting. But like most parlor games, this was probably a lot more fun for the participants than it is for the onlookers. One must remember that people have to pay to watch these things.” – North Shore Movies, 01/12/2023

“For most of its running time, M3GAN is a sicko comedy about terrible things happening to people (and animals) that deserve even worse, as well as a cautionary tale for moms and dads who find it easier to let electronic devices do the parenting for them. The best gag in Akela Cooper’s screenplay is how the doll turns evil because she spends too much time on the internet.” – North Shore Movies, 01/06/2023

“They’re clearly going for a Gran Torino thing here, with the grouchy old white guy who wants to be left alone begrudgingly befriending his adorable new immigrant neighbors and rescuing them from an external threat. But unlike Clint Eastwood’s hilariously crude codger, Hanks is merely dull and unpleasant. There’s nothing funny about his morose moods.” – North Shore Movies, 01/06/2023

“It’s not just babies that are left behind in boxes. Kore-eda repeatedly returns to a subtle, yet insistent visual motif of constraining his characters inside similar shapes. Everyone in Broker is boxed in to some degree or another by bad luck, poor choices or the circumstances of their birth. The movie is about how we help each other get out.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/05/2023

“I’ll confess that it took me a second viewing to figure out what I think Baumbach was trying to do here, which is basically making an anti-’80s movie, turning all those cliched, nostalgic Spielbergian signifiers sickly and gross. This is one of those ideas that sounds awesome in theory, until you realize that you’re going to have to look at it for 135 minutes.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 12/28/2022

”And yet, I Wanna Dance With Somebody keeps sheepishly backing away from the story’s thornier, more complicated implications, especially when it comes to matters of race. It’s indicative of the movie’s overcautious approach that we keep seeing the singer around drugs, and sometimes even holding them, but never actually using them.” – North Shore Movies, 12/22/2022

“An Aronofsky movie without any of the showmanship that makes Aronofsky movies watchable. Instead of bringing the old razzle-dazzle, he shoots it as drably and perfunctorily as he possibly can, boxing everything up into a cramped 1.33 aspect ratio in a dingy, cluttered apartment that looks like it smells bad. There’s not an interesting image in the entire picture.” – North Shore Movies, 12/18/2022

“Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ and Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz are two of the greatest movies ever made, and Bardo borrows from them egregiously. But Fellini and Fosse were wise enough to make their narcissistic stand-ins figures of fun. Iñárritu is not a filmmaker who has much of a sense of humor about himself. Or about anything else, for that matter.” – North Shore Movies, 12/16/2022

“Abbasi’s blunt-force, big-screen translation is not for the faint of heart. It’s in your face and unsparing of the horrors endured by these sad, dopesick sex workers. Hanaei liked to strangle his victims with the headscarves women are required to wear in public, a symbolic gesture that would feel hackneyed in a fictional story, but happens to be horrifyingly true.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 12/16/2022