“Jessica Chastain’s pet project is practically a textbook example of the kind of film you find playing to empty theaters during the January doldrums, squandering a spectacular cast on a snoringly generic espionage thriller with shoddy production values and some surprise plot twists that can be seen from space. Luc Besson made this stuff all look so easy.” – North Shore Movies, 01/07/2022

“While the great Iranian dramatist Asghar Farhadi’s Cannes Grand Prix winner isn’t exclusively about the internet, it uses social media as the motor for a characteristically complex examination of the ways in which we like to build people up in order to tear them down, and how situations are never as simple as they might appear on the surface.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/06/2022

“Moms aren’t supposed to have lives of their own. What makes Gyllenhall’s debut such a fascinating film is that it doesn’t try to explain away the central character or justify her petty resentments. She instead makes visceral the fears and shame of mothers who feel themselves unfit, and the guilt that comes with wanting to keep a little piece of your life to yourself.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/29/2021

“In what will no doubt cause cardiac arrests for the social media hall monitors currently having conniptions over the age gap between the platonic lovers of Licorice Pizza, Baker’s film doesn’t just tell the story of a skeezy, fortysomething guy grooming and trying to turn out a teenage girl, it also dares to be amusing about it. Sometimes appallingly so.” – North Shore Movies, 12/23/2021

“No life lessons are learned and there’s no moral to the story that I can surmise, at least not beyond the deep appreciation of faded fads, forgotten pop songs and evenings that stretch out into the night with endless possibilities for adventure. It’s a thrilling movie to watch, hurtling forward with the headlong rush of two young people who can’t wait for their lives to begin.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/22/2021

“The most lovingly photographed of the Massachusetts locations is the Wakefield Bowladrome, where it has never stopped being 1978 and all the filmmakers had to do to make it period-specific was take down the ‘No Smoking’ signs. It’s also symptomatic of a certain carelessness on Clooney’s part. I mean, who ever heard of candlepin bowling on Long Island?” – North Shore Movies 12/20/2021

“But before the surprisingly rousing third act – for my money the first time since The Avengers assembled that a Marvel movie has achieved the giddy liftoff of all your action figures landing in the same sandbox – No Way Home is some seriously rough sledding, reflecting what a non-starter Tom Holland’s MCU incarnation of Peter Parker turned out to be.” – North Shore Movies, 12/15/2021

“Being The Ricardos is shockingly dismissive of its subject’s genius, allowing Kidman to fumble her way through some brief, half-hearted slapstick while the movie is more interested in another one of Sorkin’s beloved toxic workplaces, where everybody walks-and-talks with their chests puffed out, sputtering profanities and constantly trying to one-up each other.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/09/2021

“Fabietto so hates the crummy hand he’s been dealt, he wants to create an entirely different reality to live in, and cinema allows him to build newer, more beautiful worlds from scratch. I’m not sure The Hand Of God always works, but I felt like I understood something important about Sorrentino and his elaborately constructed pictures when it was over.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/01/2021

“Branagh and his regular cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos obviously saw Roma a whole bunch of times and liked it a lot, borrowing the low-contrast black-and-white digital video, distractingly hyper-separated audio tracks and approaching every shot from the most unexpected, obtuse angle they could possibly find. Then another Van Morrison song comes on.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/01/2021