“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

“To me it feels all of a piece, restlessly questioning what constitutes decency and respectability in America. One of the wealthiest families in the world can murder half a million people and purchase unprecedented immunity with a $6 billion settlement, yet this so-called polite society is scandalized by snapshots of strippers, sex workers and drag queens.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 12/09/2022

“This might be Will Smith’s worst performance. One-note, remote, and emotionally constipated in that way movie stars can come off when they start believing their own messianic bullshit. (See also: the late works of Wahlberg, Mark.) Emancipation is not a historical document but rather an ugly, exploitative monument to one man’s out-of-control ego.” – North Shore Movies, 12/09/2022

“While I can personally confirm that managing a movie theater is an excellent way to end up in the booby hatch, Empire Of Light tries to cram too many big, serious issues into an unassuming setup, as if writer-director Sam Mendes’ memories of his childhood cinema didn’t feel important enough so he had to send neo-Nazis crashing through the front doors.” – North Shore Movies, 12/09/2022