BLACK PANTHER * * * 1 / 2
Starring Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira and Letitia Wright. Screenplay by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole. Directed by Ryan Coogler. Continue reading
2017 MURIEL AWARDS: BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
“Dafoe had maybe the trickiest job in movies last year, anchoring a cast of wildly gifted and totally green first-time actors, rolling with their improvisations and imperfections. Like his character tending to a wayward flock in a ramshackle welfare motel, Dafoe provides structure and sanity to The Florida Project. It’s impossible to imagine the movie without him.” – The Muriel Awards, 02/17/2018
BPM (BEATS PER MINUTE)
“A pungent piece of social history, chronicling the early days of the ACT UP movement in Paris with bawdy humor, bottomless compassion and a rebel yell. Campillo’s film throbs with urgency, the nimble editing constantly interrupting dialogue-heavy scenes with antsy fragments and flickers of action. These characters are running out of time.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/02/2018
MOM AND DAD
MOM AND DAD * * 1 / 2
Starring Nicolas Cage, Selma Blair, Anne Winters, Zackary Arthur and Lance Henriksen. Written and directed by Brian Taylor.
THELMA
“There are some moments of startling terror. The best jolts have an otherworldly, minimalist kick; a strand of hair suspended in a pane of glass, or again, those damn crows. But the greatest horror lies in the movie’s subtext: the internal prison of believing that your desires are destructive. It’s a movie about not being able to be who you are.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/17/2018
PHANTOM THREAD
“Panoramic vistas are fine for postcards, but I’m hard pressed to think of a landscape as fascinating as the faces of Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps. This is a fiendishly funny movie, one that’s extremely self-aware and follows its own internal logic to a conclusion that makes perfect sense while being entirely mad. I laughed myself sick.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/12/2018
THE SHINING HAUNTS THE COOLIDGE
“It is a film that feels tantalizingly incomplete, missing just a few crucial pieces that you feel certain you’re bound to catch the next time around. Every time I watch The Shining I’m pretty sure I’ve got it almost all figured out and then the whole thing just kinda gets away from me, like the way terrible nightmares dissolve in the morning light.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/11/2018
THE POST
“A brassy, swaggering Hollywood entertainment, Steven Spielberg’s The Post is a none-too-thinly veiled polemic insisting that a free and adversarial press is vital to the survival of our democracy, but in the guise of one of those zany newspaper comedies from the 1930s. It’s breathless, a little goofy and an altogether grand old time at the movies.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/04/2018
THE FIVE BEST FILMS OF 2017
“Mara and Affleck star as a couple torn asunder by his untimely death, with Affleck hanging around the house for an eternity afterward wearing a morgue sheet over his head like a Peanuts cartoon. Somehow this silly image grows to be quite plaintive and moving, with an element of deadpan Kabuki in the wry observations of a world that refuses to stop turning.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/22/2017
ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD
“Playing a suave negotiator who speaks multiple languages, Wahlberg’s lunkhead line-readings elicited titters of laughter at the advance screening I attended. There are still a few days left before the movie opens, so maybe Ridley has time to replace him with Clive Owen, Michael Fassbender or anyone who actually might make sense in the role.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/22/2017
SPLICED PERSONALITY 