THE FORGER *
Starring John Travolta, Christopher Plummer, Tye Sheridan, Abigail Spencer and Jennifer Ehle. Screenplay by Richard D’Ovidio. Directed by Philip Martin.
MISERY LOVES COMEDY
“There was a time when this might have felt perhaps not quite as exhausted as it does during this particular moment in pop culture. With the surfeit of podcasts, chat shows, and tell-all autobiographies, comedians seem to spend more time these days pontificating on the existential dilemmas of being comedians than actually telling jokes.” – Movie Mezzanine, 04/20/2015
A CRITIC STEPS BEHIND THE CAMERA: DAVID CHEN AND THE PRIMARY INSTINCT
“When we review films, it’s very easy to subscribe to the auteur theory. But what you find is that there are hundreds of decisions that go into making a film. If you’re lucky, there are also hundreds of people making a film. To attribute the cause and effect to any single human being now strikes me as inaccurate at best, misleading at worst.” – Movie Mezzanine, 04/20/2015
CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA
“A slippery, enigmatic and altogether mesmerizing film about the passage of time, and the way our ideas about art evolve according to our life experiences. It’s a movie you’ll find yourself turning over in your mind for quite some time after the closing credits roll, marinating in the heady swirl of ideas and defiantly unresolved resolutions.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 04/17/2015
DANNY COLLINS
“As Plummer explains, ‘He’s got a good heart. It’s just up his ass most of the time.’ I laughed a lot during Danny Collins and I cried a little bit, too. This is a hugely entertaining, mainstream crowd-pleaser about how we can all try to be our better selves, fail spectacularly, and then pick ourselves up and try again. Baby steps.” – Movie Mezzanine 04/08/2015
FURIOUS 7
FURIOUS 7 * * 1 / 2
Starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Kurt Russell and Jason Statham. Screenplay by Chris Morgan. Directed by James Wan.
CUT BANK
“A narcoleptic small-town neo-noir, this flagrantly derivative film wants desperately to be a Coen Brothers movie, but instead works mainly as a throwback to those off-brand knock-offs that cluttered video store shelves in the mid-’90s. Good news I guess, if you’re nostalgic for Keys to Tulsa, Clay Pigeons or Feeling Minnesota.” – Movie Mezzanine, 04/02/2015
SERENA
“Serena isn’t an embarrassment, because god forbid that would have at least made it interesting. This is just one of those drearily ambitious pictures where nothing quite works. Director Susanne Bier sticks firmly to prestige picture blandness when the material clearly calls for something much soapier and wilder.” – Movie Mezzanine, 03/27/2015
THE KIDNAPPING OF MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
“Given the subject’s storied history of confrontational audacity and general unpleasantness, I can only assume the whole joke of writer-director Guillaume Nicloux’s film is what a placid, low-key experience it turns out to be. What follows is something like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm played at half-speed with the volume turned down.” – Movie Mezzanine, 03/25/2015
GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D
“Beautiful naked women smoke cigarettes and spout Marxist rhetoric. A mysterious man on a park bench scrolls through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quotes on his iPhone. Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings is on TV in the background. There are a bunch of shady Germans zooming around in a Mercedes shooting people, because of course there are.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/20/2015
SPLICED PERSONALITY 