“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

“Dour and intensely unpleasant to watch, 65 is the dreariest, most depressing movie ever made about a spaceman using a ray gun to fight dinosaurs. God forbid something like that might be fun. Do you know why James Cameron didn’t show us Newt sobbing inconsolably over the dead bodies of her mom and dad? Because he’s an entertainer, not a sadistic moron.” – North Shore Movies, 03/10/2023

“No points for guessing if an NBA franchise comes calling with a job offer right before the big game, or for predicting it will all come down to a buzzer-beater in the final seconds. Yet there’s comfort in these cliches, a satisfaction in seeing them brought off by characters you have come to care about. There isn’t a surprise in the movie except for how enjoyable it is.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/09/2023

“One wonders what mischief some diabolically clever writers working in the subversive spirit of the first film might have wrung from current horror crazes like the artsy-fartsy tropes of A24, Blumhouse social issue soapboxes or the spate of soccer moms addicted to grisly murder podcasts. Instead, they just make Scream movies about other Scream movies.” – North Shore Movies, 03/08/2023

“Guy Ritchie’s laid-back, low-stakes caper comedy feels like the third or fourth installment of a forgotten franchise, one of those late-series entries where everybody’s happy to see each other again and nobody is going to be accused of over-exerting themselves. This is not a knock. The whole charm of the film is how breezy and blessedly inconsequential it is.” – North Shore Movies, 03/03/2023