Joined my buddy Blake Howard on his weekly film review podcast for Patreon subscribers. We talked briefly about Steven Soderbergh’s latest, disagreeing on the merits of the ghost POV while applauding the fine performance by Chris Sullivan and Soderbergh’s superhuman stamina behind the camera. Also, Blake seems to really have a thing about realtors. – One Heat Minute, 02/06/2025
My second dispatch from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Hailey Gates’ Atropia, Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project and Sierra Falconer’s Sunfish (& Other Stories From Green Lake).
My first dispatch from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Josh Osit’s Predators, Albert Birney’s OBEX and Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill.
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”The film follows an unemployed family struggling in London’s East End council estates, bluntly confronting the grinding boredom of life on the dole and the seething resentments it breeds. Nearly everything in the film is curdled and ugly, even the humor aggressive and sour. It’s one of the most vivid depictions of how people without purpose turn on each other.” – Crooked Marquee, 01/31/2025
“The steady, level-headed gaze of I’m Still Here is never as dramatically satisfying as you want it to be. It’s only in brief interludes, like at a restaurant where Eunice watches families dining together the way hers never will again, that Torres allows us to glimpse the full scale of the character’s heartbreak. The rest of the time there’s too much to do. Life goes on.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/31/2025
“The Coolidge Corner Theatre celebrates Black History Month with Icons, a six-film retrospective shining a spotlight on groundbreaking performances from throughout the years. The series kicks off with Carmen Jones, director Otto Preminger’s fascinating 1954 attempt to film Oscar Hammerstein II’s Broadway update of Bizet’s Carmen with an all-Black cast.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/30/2025
”From the missing apostrophe in the title to the herky-jerky, handheld camera and constantly slipping focus, Pennebaker’s film feautres none of the spit and polish one usually sees in showbiz docs. It’s a lot of bumpy rides from one nondescript hotel room to another, probably the most accurate depiction ever filmed of the tensions and tedium of life on the road.” – Crooked Marquee, 01/24/2025
”Crap, but not in that fun, meathead January genre movie way that provides cool counter-programming to all the Oscar nominees. It’s chintzy trash made by faded stars who are slumming. Flight Risk is incompetent hackwork, directed without attention or purpose. It’s not even gratuitously violent, which I thought was the whole point of a Mel Gibson movie.” – North Shore Movies, 01/24/2025
”Scenes play out in single, unbroken takes as the spectral spectator drifts up and down the stairs, darting in and out of bedrooms. If nothing else, it’s an incredible feat of athleticism by the 62-year-old camera operator. I got tired just watching some of these shots. Presence is a gimmick movie with a great gimmick. Too bad about the ‘movie’ part.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/23/2025
Joined Philadelphia expat Lee Stabert to talk about the Boston crime movie craze and my pet theory that these films became popular because they allow Hollywood to make underclass gangster movies without having to cast Black people. We also discussed the willful nostalgia of these films harkening back to a pre-gentrification Boston before the biotech boom. – Explain Boston To Me, 01/22/2025
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