“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

“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