“Abbasi’s blunt-force, big-screen translation is not for the faint of heart. It’s in your face and unsparing of the horrors endured by these sad, dopesick sex workers. Hanaei liked to strangle his victims with the headscarves women are required to wear in public, a symbolic gesture that would feel hackneyed in a fictional story, but happens to be horrifyingly true.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 12/16/2022
“A portrait of the artist as a little shit, Francois Truffaut’s debut feature The 400 Blows is a bracingly unsentimental look back at the director’s juvenile delinquent days. The kid was quite a handful. As far as great filmmakers’ fictionalized childhood stand-ins go, Antoine Doniel would probably steal Sammy Fabelman’s lunch money and stuff him in a locker.” – Crooked Marquee, 12/09/2022
“To me it feels all of a piece, restlessly questioning what constitutes decency and respectability in America. One of the wealthiest families in the world can murder half a million people and purchase unprecedented immunity with a $6 billion settlement, yet this so-called polite society is scandalized by snapshots of strippers, sex workers and drag queens.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 12/09/2022
“This might be Will Smith’s worst performance. One-note, remote, and emotionally constipated in that way movie stars can come off when they start believing their own messianic bullshit. (See also: the late works of Wahlberg, Mark.) Emancipation is not a historical document but rather an ugly, exploitative monument to one man’s out-of-control ego.” – North Shore Movies, 12/09/2022
“While I can personally confirm that managing a movie theater is an excellent way to end up in the booby hatch, Empire Of Light tries to cram too many big, serious issues into an unassuming setup, as if writer-director Sam Mendes’ memories of his childhood cinema didn’t feel important enough so he had to send neo-Nazis crashing through the front doors.” – North Shore Movies, 12/09/2022
“There’s a kamikaze quality to History Is Made At Night, a breathless, anything-can-happen flood of events that mirrors the headlong feeling of falling in love for the first time. The preposterous plot follows an unassailable emotional logic, so what sounds insane in synopsis seems perfectly reasonable onscreen, like a love story that starts with a phony kidnapping.” – Crooked Marquee, 12/02/2022
“On the surface this might seem an inversion of the filmmaker’s entire modus operandi, the bustling casts of coolly observed ordinary people replaced by a single performer reading scripted lines, alone in a garden with a running time a fraction of his usual three or four hours. And yet A Couple is still spiritually a Frederick Wiseman film through and through.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 12/01/2022
“I’ve seldom seen a film that has less faith in its audience. It gently spits the pre-chewed meanings of scenes into the viewers’ mouths like we’re little baby birds at feeding time. The Fabelmans is the kind of movie that a lot of critics are going to love because it’s done all the interpretation for you in advance. Attendance is barely mandatory, our attention optional.” – North Shore Movies, 11/23/2022
“It’s an insanely uneven picture, conjuring a genuinely disturbing menace when not wallowing in sappy, po-faced YA tropes. Only Guadagnino would think that shooting Stephenie Meyer’s Trouble Every Day was a bright idea, and yet the movie’s gross-out romantic climax boasts such a birdbrained commitment to the bit that I begrudgingly surrendered.” – North Shore Movies, 11/23/2022
“Johnson again takes great pleasure in subverting audience expectations, doubling back and re-setting the story every time you think you’ve got it figured out. But Glass Onion is hardly a reprise of the previous picture, switching things up from autumnal, old money New England to the sun-drenched nouveau riche and striking a more overtly farcical tone.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/21/2022
SPLICED PERSONALITY 