“A fine Thanksgiving film for dysfunctional families, the gaudily entertaining House Of Gucci also brings an early delivery of Christmas ham, providing a feast for scenery-chewers like Jeremy Irons, Jared Leto and especially Al Pacino. But the show belongs to Lady Gaga, giving one of the most preposterously enjoyable performances you’re going to see this year.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/23/2021

“The Humans is hobbled at every turn by Karam’s curious camerawork. Not just the random inserts of cruddy windowpanes and clanging pipes, but also ostentatious dolly shots that circle the table, making sure to obscure the faces of whoever you want to look at most during a given scene. It’s the most distractingly directed movie of the year not named Belfast.” – North Shore Movies, 11/23/2021

“A dungeon of necrophilia, Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a handy exegesis of everything wrong with contemporary cinema and proof positive that fandom is a pestilence. It strip-mines a nostalgia for something that never existed and treats with pseudo-religious reverence the events of a movie in which a ghost blew Dan Aykroyd in a firehouse.” – North Shore Movies, 11/19/2021

“I couldn’t tell you with any degree of confidence what the hell is happening from scene to scene, but in its own grasping, uniquely inarticulate fashion, the film captures something elusive and frightening about the way the world felt last year during lockdown. Not ‘a pandemic movie’ per se, but one possessed of the historical moment’s woozy instability.” – North Shore Movies, 11/19/2021

“It’s an excellent performance, reminding us how insanely charismatic Smith can be. But it’s also a fawning tongue bath of a movie, executive produced by the Williams sisters themselves, with every scene designed to remind you of their father’s apparent omnipotence and heroic determination in the face of adversity. They could have just bought him a tie.” – North Shore Movies, 11/19/2021

”I thought I had it all figured out, but Campion’s film blossoms into something far stranger and more seductive than its synopsis might suggest. A hothouse psychodrama about performative masculinity and the personas we put on so as not to feel so alone, it’s a menacing movie, thick with an atmosphere of lurid homoeroticism and repressed longing.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/16/2021

“A steroidal inflation of the humble palooka’s underdog saga into a jingoistic, MTV gladiator movie in which an oiled-up Stallone defeats Communism in the form of Dolph Lundgren’s Russian super-soldier. To revisit Rocky IV is to be reminded that even though you loved a movie dearly when you were ten years old, that doesn’t mean it’s actually any good.” – North Shore Movies, 11/16/2021

“Spencer has a lot of the same problems as Lisey’s Story, Larraín’s eight-hour Stephen King adaptation that aired to little notice on Apple TV+ this past summer. He’s a filmmaker who thinks in bold, often abstract images and concepts that don’t always sit well alongside conventionally scripted scenes. I liked the movie a lot until I didn’t anymore.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/04/2021

“Dismissed in some circles as a Spanish spin on Girls, the filmmaking has such a wispy, gossamer touch it’s easy to miss how much she’s getting at here in the guise of a breezy confection. Only in the fiendishly clever closing credits do you realize the deep denial diagnosed in El Planeta is suffered not just by these two characters, but also the modern world.” – North Shore Movies, 11/04/2021

“A film about mourning, but in an especially British, stiff upper lip fashion. As in the original movie, which dealt with the ravages of addiction in an almost oblique, muted mode, the roiling emotions are kept close to the vest. Hogg again employs an eggshell color palette and elliptical edits. The surfaces are placid, beneath them lies turmoil.” – North Shore Movies, 11/04/2021