”The biggest impression is made by brick shithouse Alan Ritchson, star of the Amazon series Reacher, which has gotten two seasons so far out of how much fun it is to watch a human tree trunk break stuff. Here he plays a smiling, psychotic Swede so powerful that when he uses a bow and arrow, the arrows sail straight through his targets and also kill the guys behind them.” – North Shore Movies, 04/18/2024
”Do you have to fully understand a movie in order to enjoy it? I don’t think so. Such was the case when I emerged in a pleasantly confounded state from The Beast at last year’s New York Film Festival. I saw the picture again last week and I’m not sure that I’m any closer to wrapping my head around it, but if anything I’m even more impressed. It’s a whole mood, this movie.” – North Shore Movies, 04/14/2024
”Sting is basically like E.T. except if Elliott had instead befriended a venomous space insect that wanted to eat Drew Barrymore. It’s curious that Charlotte calls the spider Sting, since spiders don’t actually sting people and it would obviously be a better name for a either a bee or the bassist from a reggae-influenced ‘80s New Wave band, but I digress.” – North Shore Movies, 04/14/2024
”What’s exasperating is how cynically Garland contorts his storytelling in order to avoid implicating any potential audience members, indulging popular rightwing fantasies about armed insurrection and lefty fears of imperial presidencies while remaining vague and noncommittal about the reasons for the war. He wants to play with firecrackers without setting them off.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/11/2024
”I wish the film had been allowed to explore some of these ideas in full, instead of laying pipe for past and future installments. Like most prequels, it only makes the story feel smaller. It’s dispiriting seeing such talent in the service of a spreadsheet. The First Omen proves that Arkasha Stevenson is a real filmmaker. Now someone should let her make a real movie.” – North Shore Movies, 04/05/2024
”As with every Allen film since Café Society, the real star is cinematographer Storaro, pushing digital color into eye-popping new contortions. Sometimes I forgot to read the subtitles because I was so captivated by the delicate play of sunlight in de Laâge’s hair. I didn’t miss much, since we’ve all seen this movie before. How do you say ‘déjà vu’ in French?” – North Shore Movies, 04/04/2024
”One should never underestimate the entertainment value of old biddies saying swears. A pleasantly amusing trifle, Wicked Little Letters is one of those quirky English village comedies that used to play for months on end at the Coolidge or West Newton back before the audience for this sort of thing started staying home and streaming television shows instead.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/04/2024
”In the films of John Cassavetes, love is madness. It’s noisy, disruptive and it breaks stuff. Minnie And Moskowitz is as close as the director ever came to shooting a straight love story… if anything in this cockeyed fairy tale can be described as straight, given all the punching and hollering and pounding on doors one comes to expect in Cassavetes country.” – Crooked Marquee, 03/29/2024
“In synopsis, it probably doesn’t sound like much: a few weeks in the lives of a Taiwanese family after their grandma gets sick. Yet this is one of those movies so emotionally expansive that you feel like it might contain the whole of human experience. Yi Yi begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral, heartbreakingly attuned to the cycles and seasons of life.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/27/2024
”An innocuous, family adventure film with too many characters and a severe shortage of jokes. Nobody is given anything especially funny to say, but these are skilled performers who can recite placeholder dialogue with comic intonations that occasionally trick your ear into thinking you’ve heard something clever. This is kind of Rudd’s whole deal as an actor.” – North Shore Movies, 03/20/2024
SPLICED PERSONALITY 