“An uncommonly astute and sometimes shockingly funny movie about the numbing aftereffects of trauma, that sticky sense of stasis while the rest of the world moves on without you. Situated in a perpetual present tense, Eva Victor’s hugely accomplished debut isn’t a film about The Bad Thing, but about how life goes on before, after and all around it.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/02/2025

“This is not a movie designed to surprise you. The pleasures lie in the confidence with which it hits the familiar beats, moving gracefully between set-pieces and montages while doodling character flourishes in the margins of tried and true formulas. There’s something comforting about how completely in command Kosinski and company are of their cliches.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/26/2025

“Veering off into incoherent espionage techno-thriller territory, it feels like they decided to just shoot the notes from a brainstorming session instead of going to the trouble of turning them into a screenplay. Promising ideas are picked up and discarded minutes later, as if trying to cram in a bunch of crappy sequels at once. Like most upgrades, it’s full of bugs.” – North Shore Movies, 06/25/2025

“The second sequel to Danny Boyle’s 2003 zombie shocker is the first chapter of a new trilogy, so it spends a galling amount of screen time setting up later installments. This is frustrating because there’s some really good stuff in here – a lot of it quite beautiful and strange – but none of it has been arranged into the rising and descending action of a story. It’s just stuff.” – North Shore Movies, 06/20/2025

“This is so idiotic one hardly knows where to begin. The Life Of Chuck is a two-hour barrage of soft-focus smiles, vaguely mystical, New Age noodling, and gaseous platitudes about carpe-ing the diem, etc. The characters speak to each other in such meaningless aphorisms, Flanagan’s dialogue sounds like a gangbang in the greeting card aisle.” – North Shore Movies, 06/14/2025

“Song is trying to take the heightened genre conventions and bring them back down to Earth. Materialists is too high-minded a movie to come up with a contrived misunderstanding that results in a classic rom-com, running-through-the-airport ending. But without that kind of corny catharsis, the film doesn’t end so much as it deflates into the closing credits.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/12/2025

“It may sound strange to describe a Wes Anderson film as the summer’s most delightful action-comedy. Missing the usual Anderson undercurrents of grief and melancholy, it’s more gag-based than anything he’s done in ages, with an early bit involving a plane’s ejector seat so exquisitely timed it caused me to make a spectacle of myself at the press screening.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/05/2025

“Remember those straight-to-video spin-offs that used to clog the shelves at your local Blockbuster, offering the cheaper and less star-studded continuing adventures of Tremors, From Dusk ‘Till Dawn or American Pie Presents? The blatantly lousy Ballerina is not so much beating a dead horse as it’s making sure all the parts have been ground up for dog food.” – North Shore Movies, 06/05/2025

“This is a movie about a beautiful woman on a big shitty boat trying to fight off a psycho who wants to make her a meal for sharks, and the filmmakers understand that this premise is enough. At a time when so many horror films have been overthought into tedious dissertations, it’s a relief to find one that has nothing on its mind beyond showing you a good time.” – North Shore Movies, 06/05/2025

“Danny and Michael Philippou’s gnarly Hansel And Gretel riff follows two grieving step-siblings in the hands of a sinister foster mother played to the hilt by Sally Hawkins. In most movies like this when you’re supposed to believe a child is in danger, a part of you knows that the filmmakers wouldn’t dare kill off a little kid. These dudes would totally kill a little kid.” – North Shore Movies, 05/30/2025