“Cuarón always utilizes the longest, most visually extravagant route into even the simplest of scenes, and after a while the self-conscious virtuosity becomes overbearing. It feels a bit like taking an aircraft carrier to go around the corner to CVS. Eventually I found myself longing for a boring old two-shot where people just talk to each other.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/06/2018

“Bloom traces the diabolically brilliant tactics via which this porcine pervert transformed modern conservatism into a billion-dollar grievance industry. It’s basically the opposite of the Mister Rogers movie in that you spend two hours with one of the worst human beings to walk the planet but in the end feel a little bit better because at least he’s dead.” – North Shore Movies, 12/05/2018

“The best thing about Chomko’s occasionally awkward Alzheimer’s drama is that it gives Robert Forster his meatiest role in ages, and it was a stroke of genius casting the rough-edged Shannon as his son. These two are seemingly incapable of false moments onscreen and have similarly hardened hides. This family really knows how to bust each other’s chops.” – North Shore Movies, 12/05/2018

“Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters sneaks up on you. It starts out as a low-key charmer akin to the filmmaker’s Still Walking or After The Storm, but then about an hour into this placid portrait things begin to unravel, undercutting the audience’s assumptions and steadily accumulating great weight and moral severity. By the time it ended I was a wreck.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/30/2018

“Orson Welles’ long-mythologized pet project, shot over a period of several years in the early 1970s, is an astonishment even wilder and more rewardingly confounding than its fabled reputation. Prickly, perverse and almost half a century later still way ahead of its time, I watched this movie twice the day it premiered and haven’t shut up about it since.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/23/2018

“It took me longer than I should probably admit to figure out that the manic camera movements are meant to mimic Van Gogh’s rapid brushstrokes, and the repeated words an aural stand-in for the artist’s layered overpainting. So basically Schnabel’s trying to make a movie about Vincent Van Gogh in the style of Vincent Van Gogh, which is pretty neat.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/21/2018

“Pretty much the movie everyone was afraid Creed was going to be. A few fine character beats drift into stale, over-familiar formulas and fawning fan service. Well-acted enough that I couldn’t hate it, but it’s all so purposefully secondhand, deliberately designed to remind you of previous installments you loved without going anywhere exciting or new.” – North Shore Movies, 11/20/2018

“A collection of six vignettes varying wildly in tone yet unified by the sardonic siblings’ prankish existentialism. These punchy little tales veer from zany slapstick to heartbreaking tragedy, all working in service of the Coens’ fatalistic, class-clown philosophy, according to which life might be just a cruel, cosmic joke but it’s a pretty good one sometimes.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/16/2018

“Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner may not be the worst movie of the year, but it’s gotta be the most inessential and out-of-touch. This banal, deeply incurious picture exudes entitlement, pining away for the good old days when the privileged and powerful closed ranks to protect their own. Reitman should make a Brett Kavanaugh film next.” – North Shore Movies, 11/15/2018

“As in Gotti, Travolta just seems miserable, alternating between scrunching up his face like something smells bad and looking like he has to poop. There’s hilariously little attention to period detail and no attempt to age the star accordingly over the story’s twenty-five year span. He appears to wear the same denim shirt for decades.” – North Shore Movies, 11/15/2018