“What’s most remarkable about Diane is the autumnal chill conjured by these cozy family dinners with increasing numbers of empty chairs at the table. After a conventionally paced first hour, the movie begins employing audacious temporal leaps much in the way that time seems to speed up as you get older, entire years flying by in what feels like a blink.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 04/04/2019
”The film makes faint gestures at the popular conventions of a gangster movie while constantly being sidetracked by the bizarre behavioral details and heightened mundanity that were this particular filmmaker’s stock and trade. It’s a movie about a testy, outsider artist and his gang of misfit collaborators, the John Cassavetes biopic once removed.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 04/03/2019
“So is Dumbo supposed to be Burton’s cautionary tale about throwing one’s lot in with such sinister corporations? A Disney blockbuster ending with celebratory shots of a theme park in flames would seem to be a statement of some sort, and if Tim Burton was still the filmmaker he was back in the 1990s I bet he probably could have pulled it off.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 04/01/2019
“The Beach Bum doesn’t have a story so much as a series of slight speed bumps that barely slow down our libertine hero’s full bongo McConaughey-isms. Whether you’ll find it all enormously entertaining or mindlessly monotonous depends on your tolerance for this sort of thing. I had a good time but will admit it makes for a long 95 minutes.” – North Shore Movies, 03/29/2019
I returned to my favorite podcast and found someone lounging around on my wife’s sofa in her ex-husband’s dead-tech post-modernistic bullshit house. Had a blast with host Blake Howard talking about the funniest minute in Michael Mann’s Heat, discussing an earlier version of the scene that took place on Crime Story and relentlessly razzing poor Ralph. – One Heat Minute, 03/26/2019
“Writer-director Jia Zhangke’s expansive, melancholy gangster epic is deceptively direct in presentation, but a closer look reveals that even the simplest scenes contain multitudes. This massively entertaining melodrama is a deeply moving and fiercely ambivalent picture about old loyalties, new beginnings and the damnable passage of time.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/20/2019
DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE * * * 1 / 2
Starring Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, Tory Kittles, Jennifer Carpenter and Don Johnson. Written and directed by S. Craig Zahler.
“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.
“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
SPLICED PERSONALITY 