“Fox has an almost comically carnal screen presence that feels like a wonderful affront to a contemporary American cinema more sexless than the days of the Hays Code. You feel like you’re doing something dirty just by looking at her, and the first half of the film works best because she’s allowed to be an obscene abstraction.” – North Shore Movies, 02/08/2021

“Meneghetti’s camerawork is as furtive as their affair, spying on the characters through peepholes and around corners. It’s a visceral film, fervent and sensual, flooded with unruly emotions. You feel the ardor of the lovers in their impossible circumstances, and swoon at the flickers of recognition that cross Chevalier’s otherwise immobile face.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/05/2021

“A nice movie about nice people. These are gifted under-actors, with Firth doing that thing where he conveys enormous amounts of emotion without moving any of the muscles in his face. What’s missing from the film, I’m afraid, is the terror. All the postcard cinematography and pleasant parties paper over what’s ugliest about this damnable disease.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/05/2021

“There’s probably no way I wasn’t going to fall hard for a picture in which a boozy projectionist teaches a kid life lessons by showing him old movies. Nevertheless, it’s impossible not to be moved by Abu Alala’s belief in art as a liberating force, and all the ways books, music and cinema can work as keys to unlocking the prisons in which we’re born.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/29/2021

“The whole movie looks like it takes place inside a catalog. Yet, depending on your tolerance for sun-dappled montages in which characters ‘live, laugh, love’ to what must have been exorbitantly expensive Led Zeppelin songs, the film goes down surprisingly easily. There’s a Hallmark-y comfort-food quality to Our Friend, but don’t expect it to tell you the truth.” – North Shore Movies, 01/21/2021

“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