”It’s the best baseball movie since Bull Durham — or maybe Bad Lieutenant — because it explores this sport’s peculiar ability to bend and distort time. As the shadows on Soldiers Field get longer, an elegiac ache settles in. Eephus is more than a movie about a game, it’s about reaching a time in your life when it feels like it’s getting late earlier and earlier.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/13/2025
BLACK BAG
”A droll marriage comedy disguised as an espionage thriller, making clever and sometimes fiendishly funny use of Blanchett’s glamourpuss opacity. Good heavens, can she wear these clothes. Black Bag plays to Soderbergh’s strengths: it’s a classy, jazzy, clockwork contraption full of intricate plot machinery and great-looking movie stars doing movie star shit.” – North Shore Movies, 03/13/2025
MADE IN MASSACHUSETTS
“The commonwealth is ready for its closeup. 192 closeups, to be exact. This sprawling, compulsively watchable collage offers clips from nearly 200 movies and television shows shot in and around the Bay State, serving as a travelogue and a history lesson while showcasing the fine work of area production crews who keep the Massachusetts film industry thriving.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/06/2025
MICKEY 17
”A kooky and digressive sci-fi allegory stew that finds the filmmaker indulging some of his silliest whims while burning through $150 million of Warner Bros. Discovery’s money. I have a soft spot for films like this, when auteurs are allowed to run amok with studio resources. There’s something exhilarating about watching an artist get goofy on such an expensive canvas.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/05/2025
ONE HOT TAKE: ON PAOLO SORRENTINO’S PARTHENOPE
Joined my buddy Blake Howard for a free episode of his weekly film review podcast. We did our best not to drool and make wolf-whistle noises while discussing the great Italian sensualist Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope, an astoundingly beautiful movie about an astoundingly beaufiful woman and the ultimately alienating disruptions she inspires wherever she goes. – One Heat Minute, 03/02/2025
SQUIRRELS TO THE NUTS: PETER BOGDANOVICH’S LOST LAST PICTURE SHOW
”Set in a fairytale Manhattan familiar from champagne comedies of the 1930s, it’s a gentle slapstick jumble of missed connections, mistaken assumptions and doors being slammed in people’s faces at fancy hotels. It’s the kind of movie where the private detective wears silly disguises because scenes like these are funnier if someone’s dressed like a rabbi.” – North Shore Movies, 02/28/2025
ALL NIGHT LONG: CHANTAL AKERMAN’S TOUTE UNE NUIT
”We meet more than seventy characters on a long, hot summer night’s journey into day, catching them on the fly as they come together or part ways. It’s a movie that’s all climaxes, a dizzyingly romantic array of clinches and farewells that becomes a hypnotic abstraction of bodies clasping together and ripping themselves asunder. You watch it like fireworks.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/28/2025
OSCARS 2025
“One of my favorite Oscar moments occurred during the 2002 ceremony when Robert Altman and David Lynch both lost the Academy Award for Best Director to Ron Howard for A Beautiful Mind. Lynch later recollected that when Howard’s name was announced, Altman had called him over, pulled him close and said, ‘It’s better this way, David.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/27/2025
EVERYBODY WANG CHUNG TONIGHT: WILLIAM FRIEDKIN’S TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A.
”However hard To Live and Die in L.A. might try to look and sound like another gleaming, shitty ‘80s movie, it’s got the rotting, miserable soul of a 1970s masterpiece. The movie’s slick, music video affectations can’t conceal the fundamental scuzziness. All the golden sunsets and neon lights feel like a battered woman’s smudged makeup over a black eye.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/21/2025
MILLERS IN MARRIAGE
”Burns’ beer commercial good looks have served him well in Hollywood rom-coms over the years, and here once again provide motivation for the filmmaker’s favorite themes: (1.) ‘Look how many beautiful women want to sleep with Edward Burns’ and (2.) ‘These bitches sure are crazy.’ Yeah, it’s awkward sharing a surname with a filmmaker you think sucks.” – North Shore Movies, 02/21/2025









