“For nearly thirty years, the Dardennes have been telling stories about characters struggling on the margins. When you’re desperate and poor, life takes place in the present tense, and so the films move from one immediate obstacle to another. Occasionally, there is a fleeting moment of grace; an unexpected act of tenderness. Or in this case, a song.” – North Shore Movies, 04/07/2023
“Enormously entertaining and maybe just a little bit evil, Ben Affleck’s Air is about how a humble $100 million corporation became a behemoth worth billions, a miracle of marketing the film treats as a triumph of the human spirit. This anatomy of a celebrity endorsement is an underdog sports movie without the sports. And without the underdogs.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/04/2023
“The story is a scorching, unwieldy, noir-tinted melodrama overflowing with operatic emotions and doomy fatalism. Journeyman Lewis Milestone doesn’t so much direct Robert Rossen’s script as he tries to keep up with it. In the hands of a great visual stylist (like Rossen himself) the movie could have been a masterpiece. As is, it’s still a corker.” – Crooked Marquee, 03/31/2023
“Wears its world-building with a refreshingly light touch, sending the spry cast on a semi-nonsensical trek through a whole host of half-explained medieval fantasy tropes, interrupted by massive, impersonal effects sequences that stop the film dead in its tracks. A cheaper, chintzier version of this movie might have been as much fun as these actors appear to be having.” – North Shore Movies, 03/31/2023
“This is some serious Marvin Berry shit, depicting artists like The Isley Brothers, Gladys Knight and Donna Summer as medium-talent rubes headed nowhere until this smooth-talking white boy sauntered into the studio and showed them how it’s done. Aside from being incredibly offensive to anybody who cares about this music, the movie is also terrible.” – North Shore Movies, 03/30/2023
“Thirty-eight years before winning the Academy Award for Best Actress, Michelle Yeoh started her career as a leading lady by slamming a heavy book of Michelangelo paintings shut on a trench-coated flasher’s junk in this nutty 1985 Hong Kong thriller. Yes, Madam! is a rather ridiculous film. But in it, you can see a superstar being born.” – Crooked Marquee, 03/24/2023
“The movie’s massiveness is part of the joke, its sheer scale the stuff of absurdist comedy. By the time we get to Paris, the overkill attains a giddy, orgiastic grandeur. Walter Hill’s The Warriors is restaged as exquisitely orchestrated automotive mayhem, then one-upped by a Buster Keaton-worthy stunt on a stubborn flight of stairs. They even borrow from Barry Lyndon.” – North Shore Movies, 03/24/2023
“The three films are dense with ideas, offering a complexity of thought that stands in sad contrast to what passes for discourse today. You can’t fit Baldwin’s worldview into a tweet. He’s funny and urbane, with no time for traditional talking points or the kind of self-congratulation you get from folks who make a big deal out of letting you know they have good politics.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/23/2023
“The city’s self-described ‘sensory bacchanalia from beyond the mainstream’ boasts fourteen features and six shorts packages covering the whole waterfront of weird. From splattery horror to environmental terrorism to alien invasions and even some Scandinavian cringe comedy, there’s something here to blow just about anybody’s ears back.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/21/2023
“One of the highlights is a honey of a performance by Richard Roundtree as an old flame of Fonda’s trying to rekindle their relationship. These two have got killer chemistry, enough to make you wish we’d gotten to see Shaft and Barbarella knock boots back in the day. This might be the first time I’ve spent a movie rooting for two octogenarians to get it on.” – North Shore Movies, 03/18/2023
SPLICED PERSONALITY 