“A madcap, laugh-a-minute sprint calling out just how unimaginative contemporary studio animation has become. Spider-Verse cheerfully tosses aside the Pixar house style to which most CGI adventures are beholden, indulging instead in wild, expressionistic flights of fancy complete with flying thought balloons, sound-effects text bubbles and narration blocks.” – North Shore Movies, 12/13/2018
”Von Trotta’s beguilingly personal project is a loose collection of conversations about the legendary filmmaker’s life and influence, offering a counterintuitively shaggy portrait of giant renowned for his rigid austerity. There are certainly worse ways to spend an afternoon than watching a bunch of brilliant artists talk about their favorite Bergman pictures.” – North Shore Movies, 12/13/2018
”Five Fingers For Marseilles transplants the style and structure of 1960s Italian spaghetti westerns to the shantytowns of South Africa. Cape Town native Michael Matthews lovingly cribs from the Sergios to craft a craggy, gutbucket epic full of slightly silly, mythopoetic grandeur and a tart taste of regional politics. It’s amazing how well some tropes travel.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/07/2018
“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
“Paramount took the costly and fairly unprecedented step of re-releasing it with an overhauled promotional campaign, to little avail. Yet it’s somehow fitting that Wonder Boys managed to flop twice, as the movie is practically a valentine to failure. This is a warmly humane and often side-splittingly funny exploration of underperforming against expectations.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/27/2018
Had a wonderful time as always sitting in with friends Kris Jenson and Evan Crean to discuss Chris Pine’s full frontal Netflix epic, some highlights from the Boston Jewish Film Festival, a disappointing new sequel that probably just should have been called Rocky VIII and Evan’s unexpected reaction to finally seeing First Reformed. – Spoilerpiece Theatre, 11/24/2018
“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
SPLICED PERSONALITY 