DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE  * * * 1 / 2

Starring Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, Tory Kittles, Jennifer Carpenter and Don Johnson. Written and directed by S. Craig Zahler.

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“A heaping plate of meat-and-potatoes comfort food, Triple Frontier is a throwback to the sort of solid, mid-budget action pictures studios used to crank out during the spring and fall off-seasons back before everything had to be a godforsaken franchise. Unpretentious, unassuming and a bit better than expected, it’s the kind of movie you talk about with your dad.” – North Shore Movies, 03/15/2019

STARFISH  * * * 1 / 2

Starring Virginia Gardner, Christina Masterson, Eric Beecroft, Natalie Mitchell, Shannon Hollander. Written and directed by A.T. White.

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“In today’s Hollywood, women of a certain age too often find themselves making dirty grandma jokes in sitcom-y garbage like last year’s Book Club. Director Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria Bell is a blessedly more dignified affair, genuinely interested in growing older gracefully and attuned to an everyday loneliness that for a lot of folks is just a fact of life.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/14/2019

“Shot in 19 days on a minuscule budget, it’s a threadbare-looking movie short on extras and exteriors with stock footage standing in for most of the establishing shots. But this paucity of resources wouldn’t be such a problem if it didn’t also extend to the vision behind the project. Timoner brings no palpable passion nor any particular point of view.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/07/2019

“A drab-looking chase picture awash in tedious exposition and overbearing period pop culture references. The movie appears to visually constrict as it goes along, beginning in the vast reaches of outer space and moving through progressively smaller and less spectacular settings until finally everyone’s having a fist-fight in a rec room full of junk.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/06/2019

“I find Perry’s films fascinating in how violently they whiplash from juvenile tastelessness to churchy sermonizing and back again. The lowest of lowbrow comedy is interrupted by exhortations to get right with Jesus. Meanwhile, all of this is staged with such little regard for basic principles of filmmaking that certain scenes approach the realm of outsider art.” – North Shore Movies, 03/02/2019

“An 84-minute collage with the sensory impact of an audio-visual apocalypse, The Image Book is a discursive and disjointed procession of lightning-quick clips and fractured scene fragments snatched out of everything from classic Hollywood movies to ISIS recruitment videos, stitched back-to-back and upside down in a swirling stream of consciousness.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/01/2019

“Greta is a feast to look at and pretty much a riot to watch, infusing its generic stalker plot with all sorts of wild and wooly weirdness, fashioning it into a high-camp showcase for international art-house treasure Isabelle Huppert. It’s Neil Jordan’s most gonzo fairy tale since his unfairly derided In Dreams, and in Huppert he’s found his ideal Big Bad Wolf.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/27/2019

“The movie was coolly received when it opened last year’s Cannes Film Festival, but I found a fascinating formal tension at play here. Looser and pulpier than Farhadi’s previous pictures, Everybody Knows is what happens when one of our stodgier dramatists teams up with two movie stars who always look like they just finished having sex.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/14/2019