“For about half the movie, it’s a wild ride. Then it becomes something else altogether; a journey of healing and advocacy, about coming to terms with a horror almost impossible to imagine, trying to take all that pain and turn it into something positive. Being from Boston I was familiar with Crimmins’ story, but I still wasn’t ready for how deep the film cut.” – Movie Mezzanine, 08/21/2015
STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON * * *
Starring Jason Mitchell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Corey Hawkins, R. Marcos Taylor and Paul Giamatti. Screenplay by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff. Directed by F. Gary Gray.
“Wickedly amusing in its depiction of just how helpless and ineffectual these kids are from the moment they step out of their bubble, Fort Tilden is like a darkly comic adaptation of those hand-wringing articles about how millennials are so coddled they can’t hack it in the real world. These two can’t even get themselves to the beach, for Chrissakes.” – Movie Mezzanine, 08/14/2015
RICKI AND THE FLASH * * * 1 / 2
Starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Mamie Gummer, Audra McDonald and Rick Springfield. Screenplay by Diablo Cody. Directed by Jonathan Demme.
“A compromised work about how compromise eats the soul, it has a boozy, slouchy grandeur that troubles your dreams for weeks after the closing credits roll. This is Peckinpah’s final word on a genre he helped to define, and what a hopeless, despairing word that is. It’s the greatest movie you almost never got a chance to see.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 08/10/2015
“Nothing that follows matches the stripped-down smarts of the opening act, and the promising premise never develops into a proper story. The sparseness starts to feel more like emptiness. Watts seems to be shooting for the clockwork contraption quality the Coens brought to No Country For Old Men, but his screenplay is woefully short on mechanics.” – Movie Mezzanine, 08/07/2015
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION * * * 1 / 2
Starring Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Alec Baldwin. Written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie.
“A worthy tribute to a monumental talent. Riley cuts it all together impressionistically, at his best when using edits to suggest how much the actor’s father informed brutish Stanley Kowalski. If sometimes the loose-limbed film threatens to drift into incoherence, that’s also quite fitting for a story told by Marlon Brando.” – Movie Mezzanine, 07/31/2015
“There was no subject nor any genre that he couldn’t somehow turn into a Robert Altman movie. Other filmmakers tell stories, Altman created ecosystems. He built minutely detailed worlds, mostly governed by sadness and systemic corruption, and then sent his iconoclastic heroes ping-ponging off the walls of their limitations, often failing spectacularly” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/30/2015
IRRATIONAL MAN * 1 / 2
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Parker Posey, Jamie Blackley and Ethan Phillips. Written and directed by Woody Allen.
SPLICED PERSONALITY 