“Like the recent, risible Gotti, the film is infused with a dumbshit nostalgia for a time when tough guys took care of things on their own. It’s practically an act of advocacy on behalf of mobsters, equivocating Lansky’s role in countless murders as the same business as your local state lottery. If the movie weren’t so incompetent, it would be infuriating.” – North Shore Movies, 06/25/2021
“If this isn’t your kind of thing, get ready for the longest 92 minutes of your life. But for some of us the word ‘pretentious’ isn’t necessarily a pejorative, and it can be downright thrilling to watch two artists follow each other all the way out on a limb like this and start sawing it off. Ferrara and Dafoe are making cinema in a world that wants to watch television.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/22/2021
Celebrating the 40th anniversary of one of the few perfect movies, my buddy Blake Howard and I waxed nostalgic on this Patreon subscriber exclusive remembering Raiders Of The Lost Ark. We discuss how deftly the screenplay layers in backstory and confess to our childhood crushes on a certain tomboy bartender in an evening gown. – One Heat Minute, 06/21/2021
“It’s a film about listlessness and inertia, and being bored in unfamiliar places. Take Me Somewhere Nice unfurls in a hazy torpor, like a record playing at the wrong speed. So many scenes begin with Alma waking up and wondering where she is, a groggy sensation that the movie makes mutual. But when it’s over you feel like you’ve been someplace.” – North Shore Movies, 06/17/2021
“Shot in stunning, super-high-contrast 16mm black-and-white, the picture presents a child’s-eye perspective of endless possibility and wonder, in which every landscape looks like a cross between a junkyard and a playground. This is the kind of movie that you want to hold dear, even when it’s being as messy and mood-swingy as one of the kids it chronicles.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/17/2021
A quick dispatch from the 2021 Tribeca Festival containing capsule reviews of Eddie Martin’s The Kids, Adam Leon’s Italian Studies and Nadia Szold’s Larry Flynt For President.
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“An antidote to pandering crap like Hillbilly Elegy, the movie eschews melodramatic flourishes, and I could have watched these characters busting each other’s chops in the factory breakroom or goofing around down at the roller rink all day. Writer-director Riegel says it was inspired by her own experiences growing up and you can tell from the textures.” – North Shore Movies, 06/10/2021
“Romero’s great subject as an artist was the scary precarity of our society, and how quickly men become beasts when the comforts of civilization are rudely ripped away. The Amusement Park is his explicit warning about a crass, commercial culture with no regard for anything but the present, and how we are all doomed to soon be forgotten and ignored.” – North Shore Movies, 06/08/2021
“Larraín’s entrancingly artsy Jackie turned the White House into the Overlook Hotel, with Natalie Portman’s blood-spattered widow wandering the historic halls like a ghost in a pillbox hat. The best segments of Lisey’s Story have a similarly shell-shocked effect, collapsing past and present with scenes from their marriage bleeding into the echoey, empty now.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/03/2021
“The movie has had a rough reception stateside, perhaps predictably, because Lessovitz’s story sees a minority subculture through the eyes of a straight, white male protagonist, one of the worst crimes you can commit according to the current cultural commentariat. It doesn’t matter to such folks that this is a sensitive, thoughtful feature debut.” – North Shore Movies, 05/31/2021
