“Like so many movies siloed off to subscribers in our streaming service dystopia, this nifty alien-invasion thriller is only available on Hulu, where most people’s miscalibrated televisions and tinny laptop speakers will mangle the cool colors and excellent sound design. I wish I’d been able to see it in a theater packed with teens in the mood for a good scream.” – North Shore Movies, 09/21/2023
“Director Craig Gillespie specializes in smarmy takes on true-life tales, and he tries to turn the GameStop saga into a slobs-versus-snobs comedy, albeit one suspiciously short on jokes. Dumb Money is mostly montages of news footage and memes interspersed with a few scenes in which famous actors look at their phones and say swears.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/21/2023
“The styles and subject matter are all over the map. The one constant is a sense of endless possibility. With the liberation of location shooting, lightweight cameras and faster film stocks came a new language of expression, which manifested in many of these movies as an intoxicating irreverence, the feeling that old rules were made to be broken.” – North Shore Movies, 09/18/2023
“Branagh has become such a puzzling filmmaker, always putting the camera in the oddest places. A Haunting In Venice isn’t slathered with as much tacky CGI as his previous Poirot movies, probably because nobody has to pretend to be on a train or a boat. But it’s full of ostentatious shots tilted up through the floorboards or from inside the fireplace.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/14/2023
“As befitting this aesthetic, director D.B. Stockfleth’s film is a good deal more visually interesting than your usual rockumentary. Talking head interviews are intertwined with groovy animations and lovingly degraded home videos, all layered on top of each other with the same harmonic sensibility these musicians used for their four-track recordings.” – North Shore Movies 09/14/2023
“Not a lot of a surprises here, save for the quality of the performances from Campbell and Dickinson, who invest their slowly thawing relationship with genuine feeling. She’s a dynamo in the Tatum O’Neal tough cookie mode. There’s scarcely a scene you won’t see coming a mile away, but it’s comforting when formulas are handled with this kind of care.” – North Shore Movies, 09/14/2023
“Compelling, if confoundingly structured, director Danny Wu’s documentary borrows its title from an early draft of Kane and profiles three citizens epitomizing their country’s cruelly unfulfilled promises. The movie makes a convincing case that the American experiment requires constant care, because we’ve always been perilously close to the abyss.” – North Shore Movies, 09/10/2023
“It’s like a music history class taught by instructors who are all a little zonked. Robertson was only 33 when the film was shot, the same age as another Scorsese protagonist who pulled into Nazareth. And if I could have one wish for the world, it’s that we all may someday find somebody who looks at us the way Martin Scorsese photographs Robbie Robertson.” – Crooked Marquee, 09/08/2023
“The series showcases a dozen of the director’s documentaries, features and shorts, headlined by a new 4K restoration of The Mother And The Whore. Films with such outsized reputations don’t always live up to them, but an afternoon spent finally catching up with Eustache’s masterpiece turned out to be one of the great moviegoing experiences of my life.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/05/2023
“These Skinemax After Dark specials all seemed to feature the same Pacific Coast Highway vistas, blue moonlit mansions and cherry red sportscars. Then come the gruntless, un-sweaty sex scenes in front of a fireplace or in the bathtub, typically surrounded by billowing drapes and candles. Lord, so many candles. Cue the cheesy synthesizers and sax solos.” – North Shore Movies, 09/01/2023
SPLICED PERSONALITY 