“If you don’t find sub-Tarantino schtick like professional killers discussing children’s television inherently hilarious this could end up being the longest ride of your life. In fact, if there’s a joke that doesn’t land for you in Bullet Train, you’d better learn to love it anyway, because it’s gonna get repeated ad infinitum over the next two hours and change.” – North Shore Movies, 08/05/2022
“As an uptight executive rocked by the re-appearance of her abusive former lover, Rebecca Hall gives a performance so ferocious and overdetermined I’m not surprised to hear it being hailed as a tour-de-force. The lanky British thespian is one of the hardest working actresses in showbiz, or maybe more accurately, one of the hardest acting actresses in show business.” – North Shore Movies, 08/05/2022
“A rock-solid example of old-fashioned Hollywood craftsmanship, Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives hums along with a brisk, all-business efficiency. The film takes its emotional temperature from the stiff-upper-lip professionalism of the rescue divers, with a brusque aversion to schmaltz that’s a surprise coming from this particular director.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/04/2022
”This storybook romance was messy from the start. People got hurt. The Last Movie Stars doesn’t skimp on the unsavory details – the fighting, philandering and drinking – but doesn’t dwell on them, either. One comes away with a sense of two difficult people who loved each other so much they eventually found a way to work it out, but it wasn’t easy.” – North Shore Movies, 07/27/2022
“A throwback to funny Friday night fright flicks like Tremors or Signs, Peele’s latest is an audience picture full of good, old-fashioned jump scares and blessed with an economy of scale. How refreshing to see a summer sci-fi blockbuster in which the fate of the world doesn’t hang in the balance. It’s just a few colorful characters trying to not get eaten by a monster.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/20/2022
“The feature debut of Homecoming showrunner Eli Horowitz wants to be a horror movie about the desperate lengths to which people will go to avoid aging in a culture only interested in youth. That the film features a 50-year-old lead who doesn’t look a day over 35 is either egregious miscasting or a level of irony too sophisticated for this reviewer to grasp.” – North Shore Movies, 07/15/2022
“No living director so evocatively photographs a tangle of limbs, or is as adept at capturing the electric charge of two people sharing a small physical space. Like most Claire Denis films, Both Sides Of The Blade is about the battles between our bodies and our minds, wherein our unexplainable longings beat out logic and what’s good for us every time.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/14/2022
“The movie mashes up a whole stew of ‘90s action tropes and rips entire pages out of the screenplay for Speed. But since this is another affair from producer Randall Emmett’s cash-strapped crap factory, we can assume most of the film’s funding was divvied up amongst the twenty-eight credited producers as not a lot of dollar value has actually made it onscreen.” – North Shore Movies, 07/01/2022
“It’s all a convoluted way to turn these 1990s relics loose on modern times, and while the world may have changed, Beavis and Butt-head blessedly have not. There are a few flashes of the satirical genius that creator Mike Judge brought to his depressingly prophetic 2006 film Idiocracy, but for the most part, the movie is perfectly content to be brilliantly inane.” – North Shore Movies, 06/29/2022
“In a cleverly counterintuitive choice, the directors keep the camera locked down at a considerable distance from the performers. Any other movie would shove the zaniness in our faces with wacky music and close-ups, but these antics are wryly, amusingly entombed within a still screen full of dead air and empty space. Gargantuan egos have seldom seemed so small.” – North Shore Movies, 06/24/2022
SPLICED PERSONALITY 