“Valadez sidesteps the hard-hitting Sicario style one might expect for such a story in favor of something dreamier and more abstract. There are some images here that will sear themselves into your brain. Everything in the film feels as forlorn as the hollowed-out ghost town Magdalena and Miguel discover where a vibrant community used to be.” – North Shore Movies, 01/21/2021

“To watch The Climb is to remember that comedy can indeed still be directed. The camera works as a partner here with the performers. Director Covino has conceptualized these scenes as complex physical experiences purposely playing around with the audience’s POV to sometimes sublime ends. It is, for lack of a better word, cinema.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/19/2021

“Screenwriter Knight smartly caters the role to everything at which Hathaway excels. Linda is type-A, buttoned-up and wild at heart, over-talking her way through sanctimonious speeches with a rigid physicality that keeps getting distracted and going all slinky whenever her lusty eyes light up. I’d kill to see her play Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.” – North Shore Movies, 01/15/2021

“Stallone spills his saga with a breathtaking lack of self-awareness and the undisguised mean streak of the perpetually aggrieved. I suppose there’s something potentially tragic about a less-talented little brother feeling forever outshined, but the documentary is just a giant whine. It’s 73 minutes of Fredo’s ‘I’m smart and I want respect!’ speech from Godfather II.” – North Shore Movies, 01/11/2021

“After fifteen years of hotshot young directors ripping off Alfonso Cuarón’s battle sequences from Children Of Men, apparently now they’ve moved on to stealing the stillbirth scene from Roma? I suppose one can admire the technical bravado required to choreograph the 1917 of crib death while also wondering why such a thing would be necessary.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/07/2021

“It’s an ungainly film but not ineffective, particularly in the silent scenes with a gruff Clooney hidden behind a large David Letterman beard, his haunted eyes filling in the missing dialogue. An unexpected spirit of can-do positivity carries it through to a revelation you can see coming lightyears away, yet made me cry all the same. Look, it’s been a long year.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/17/2020

“For such a square story it feels wonderfully subversive, as Ashe has moved the entire aesthetic of the Technicolor melodrama uptown. These perfectly painted sets and impeccably pressed clothes aren’t attempting to replicate reality, but rather a dream life in the movies from which people who look like the cast of Sylvie’s Love have always been excluded. Until now.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/17/2020

“The search for authentic experiences in our over-mediated age can be an elusive one, almost as slippery as this provocative mood piece from writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. In the film’s quieter moments we feel the character’s yearning for real connections in a modern world where everything, to some degree or another, is a performance being staged.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/17/2020

“Director Wolfe hasn’t made much of an attempt here to reimagine the play as a movie. Which is fine, because when the cast and the material are this strong sometimes it’s preferable to just have a record of the performances. Especially Boseman’s, which feels like the first role in the electrifying second act of a career cut heartbreakingly short. What an incalculable loss.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/17/2020

“Tenet is practically a Christopher Nolan fetish film, fawning over all the director’s favorite things: temporal loops, bespoke suits, large-format photography, sexless saviors, Michael Caine, dialogue-muffling masks and a curiously stunted way of looking at the world that feels derived almost entirely from James Bond movies of the 1960s and ’70s.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/17/2020