“In fact, Daniela Vega is so very good it’s impossible to watch A Fantastic Woman without wishing she’d been given more to do than just suffer. She wanders through the movie numbed with grief and absorbing abuse, which is compelling on a human level but dramatically monotonous. There aren’t exactly a lot of surprises here.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/23/2018
”There’s a clear post-Brexit anxiety bubbing under the proceedings, as we watch London’s upper crust devouring itself. None of these well-meaning, hyper-educated liberals have been able to see what’s been happening right under their noses. But beyond any political implications it’s just a pleasure to watch these performers ping-ponging off one another.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/21/2018
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
“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
“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 * * 1 / 2
Starring Nicolas Cage, Selma Blair, Anne Winters, Zackary Arthur and Lance Henriksen. Written and directed by Brian Taylor.
“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
“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
“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
“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
SPLICED PERSONALITY 