“More of a conversation-starter than an argument, asking questions for which there are no easy answers and playing upon our sympathies to trick the audience into interrogating our own personal permission structures. There’s nothing didactic about Tár, nor any simple moral you can hashtag or put on a bumper sticker. The film is complicated. Difficult.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/12/2022
Category Archives: Reviews
DARK GLASSES
“The whole point of going to a Dario Argento picture is to see the gorgeously operatic, over-the-top set-pieces. But while Arnaud Rebotini’s score finds an appropriately soaring 1980’s synth groove, the murky cinematography by Matteo Cocco is strictly amateur hour, offering none of the director’s trademark kinky colors or lurid camera movements.” – North Shore Movies, 10/12/2022
AMSTERDAM
“David O. Russell’s top-heavy, Prohibition-era farce lumbers down a very long runway without ever really taking flight. Reckless and sometimes quite silly, nothing about Amsterdam works, per se. And yet, there’s a loopy, eager energy to the picture that inspires a peculiar affection. It’s a blundering mess of a movie, but an endearing one.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/06/2022
MONA LISA AND THE BLOOD MOON
“Judging from her first three movies, I still have no idea if writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour is capable of telling a straightforward story. I’m also not sure she’s particularly interested in doing so. The fiercely talented filmmaker is a dazzling designer of environments, creating luminous and dangerous spaces in which her archetypal characters can roam.” – North Shore Movies, 10/06/2022
BROS
“So many of the movie’s running gags are about how comfortably gay pop culture has become, including a mercilessly funny flashback to Bobby’s Queer Eye audition and a less successful Brokeback parody. These bits only amplify the disconnect between the picture’s posturing as a milestone and the feeling that it’s awfully late to the party.” – North Shore Movies, 10/02/2022
THE GOOD HOUSE
”It’s a perfect role for Sigourney Weaver, whose crisp, patrician air always seems to be keeping something wilder just barely in check. Directors Forbes and Wolodarsky try to liven things up by having her break the fourth wall and confide in the audience directly, a gimmick that’s been so abused on television as of late I’d be happy to see it retired for a while.” – North Shore Movies, 10/01/2022
THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER
“Plodding along in a bleary no man’s land between satire and sentimentality, Farrelly is too reverential of our boys in uniform to really reckon with that obscene conflict, settling for a po-faced acknowledgement that things ‘were complicated’ over there. It’s the most genial of war films, keeping the bloody violence (and the Vietnamese) almost entirely offscreen.” – North Shore Movies, 09/29/2022
BLONDE
“I don’t begrudge anyone for not wanting to sit through a movie this miserable and intentionally upsetting, but the trigger warning is right there in the NC-17 rating and there’s no shame in not being tall enough for the ride. There should be a place for films like Blonde to explore unpleasant images and ideas for an adult audience.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/27/2022
DON’T WORRY DARLING
“The biggest problem with Don’t Worry Darling is that it takes the audience maybe fifteen minutes to come to the same conclusion that Pugh finally figures out after a full two hours. It’s a drag being so far ahead of the characters the entire time, and Wilde’s maddeningly repetitive structure makes the viewer feel as trapped as the protagonist.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/22/2022
PEARL
“More a creepy psychological character study than a kill-crazy slasher movie, it cedes West’s can-you-top-this camera trickery to a stunning, go-for-broke performance by co-screenwriter Mia Goth that would no doubt be recognized by awards bodies everywhere if people who cared about movie awards watched movies like Pearl. She’s incredible.” – North Shore Movies, 09/19/2022









