“It could easily have been a cautionary tale, but Walker has made something slipperier and a good deal sadder. She’s more interested in the aftermath, locking the camera onto McKenna-Bruce’s achingly expressive face as she dissociates on the dance floor. This is very much a cinematographer’s movie, evoking emotions through color and physical space.” – North Shore Movies, 02/09/2024
”Completed in 1971 but never released theatrically until now, David Schickele’s hybrid-documentary-slash-hangout-movie is a portrait of a place that was already gone by the time the film was finished. The movie drifts through semi-improvised dalliances and affairs, spending idle, languorous afternoons with San Francisco’s activist community.” – North Shore Movies, 02/09/2024
“The fun thing about Frederick Wiseman films is that during them I often find myself fascinated by subjects I normally couldn’t care less about, such as the brushing and temperature controlled bacterial cultivation of French cheese curds. (I don’t even like cheese.) It’s the attention and level of care that make this such a pleasurable way to spend four hours.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/08/2024
”A non-stop barrage of creepy-crawly bugs and bats and eyeball soup and chilled monkey brains, unleashed with a naughty child’s delight in the inappropriate. Despite the precision of the filmmaking, one never gets a sense that Lucas and Spielberg are entirely in control of their material. The film feels more reckless than Raiders. Dangerous, even. Anything goes.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/07/2024
”This is confusing and distracting, yet oddly in keeping with the movie’s laborious dedication to prohibitively expensive reproductions of perfectly good things that already exist. Why bother with a real Beatles song or an actual shooting location when you can instead spend a fortune on a slightly unnerving digital simulacrum? I mean, look at that cat.” – North Shore Movies, 02/02/2024
”With the help of Mean Streets cinematographer Kent Wakeford and editor Marcia Lucas, Alice has a roving, wobbly visual technique, the unsettled camera evoking the characters’ uncertain living situations. It’s more volatile than you’d expect from a story like this, scenes abruptly exploding into laughter or tears as befitting an exhausted mom’s mood swings.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/02/2024
”Arthur was typically cast as a tightly-wound professional coming charmingly unglued by her male co-stars and the chaotic circumstances surrounding her. What made her heroines unique was that they never seemed diminished, even when falling to pieces. These weren’t shrews to be tamed, but rather independent women blossoming into their best selves.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/01/2024
My second dispatch from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Nathan Silver’s Between The Temples, Josh Margolin’s Thelma and India Donaldson’s Good One.
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My first dispatch from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, Michael John Warren’s Lolla: The Story Of Lollapalooza and Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions.
”What’s unexpected, and undeniably amusing, is that these kids curse like sailors, spitting Scarface volumes of profanity on the field. This is presumably why The Underdoggs has gone straight to streaming, so underage viewers won’t have to worry about sneaking into an R-rated movie and can watch it as easily as they watch porn on their phones.” – North Shore Movies, 01/25/2024
SPLICED PERSONALITY 