“To the extent that The Menu works at all, it’s as a coming-out party for newly minted movie star Taylor-Joy, proving charismatic enough carry even a piece of junk like this on her shoulders. The rich shadings and deep shadows of Peter Deming’s marvelous cinematography play especially great on her angular features. You can see why the chef is smitten with her.” – North Shore Movies, 11/20/2022
“Moreau wanders the Paris streets at night, abandoned and alone. Malle and cinematographer Henri Decaë shot these scenes with their camera in a baby carriage, the scandalously makeup-free star illuminated only by the lights of the city surrounding her. Quietly revolutionary, it’s one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful passages in any movie of its era.” – Crooked Marquee, 11/18/2022
“If there’s a term for global warming in the Quechua language, we don’t hear it aloud. We don’t need to. Our impending climate catastrophe colors every action in the film, which is about what happens when a way of life becomes unsustainable. Utama is not exactly what one would call a subtle or particularly complex piece of storytelling. Nor does it need to be.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/17/2022
“Tarantino has a voracious appetite for cinema but it is by no means boundless, existing within sharply circumscribed parameters of genre and exploitation movies. His disdain for anything that could be perceived as highfalutin’ or hoity-toity is like living on a diet entirely of cheeseburgers, leaving the reader wishing that Quentin might try a salad once in a while.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/16/2022
“The rest of the film is given over to an unimaginative quest for revenge and advertisements for upcoming Disney content, eventually coming back around to familiar Marvel dogma that the most powerful weapons in the world are best left unchecked in the hands of royal families and benevolent billionaires, who will always have our best interests in mind.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/08/2022
“It is the month when we give thanks for leggy, duplicitous dames and doomed private dicks played for patsies. November is Noirvember, celebrating Hollywood’s hard-boiled fools for love and the frisky femme fatales that are their undoing, bringing back the best in cynical thrillers with bungled murder plots, bummer endings and sardonic voice-over narrations.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/04/2022
“The Outfit has been assembled with an unfussy expertise that seemed like no great shakes to film critics 49 years ago, but feels like a lost art today. Duvall is coiled like a cobra while big teddy bear Baker is expansive and gregarious. The latter basically steals the picture, lending considerable, cherubic warmth to the sometimes too-cool proceedings.” – Crooked Marquee, 11/04/2022
“Good lord, is Terrifier 2 disgusting. It’s also a blast, if you’re into this kind of thing. Thornton has a terrific physicality. There’s something silly about him, a lightness that makes the ridiculously extended dismemberments feel like an elaborate joke: a gag in both senses of the word. It’s all in good fun even while being one of the grossest movies ever made.” – North Shore Movies, 10/27/2022
“A wonderful movie about two ordinary people trying to do their best to muddle through everyday circumstances, with the humane acknowledgement that such things are tougher on some folks than others and an opportunity for transcendence in our quietest moments. Causeway is the kind of film we come to festivals like IFFBoston to see.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/25/2022
“Alan Parker’s scandalous supernatural thriller Angel Heart is scary as hell but also something of a hoot, with a mordant sense of humor and some of the genre’s greatest character names. The crooner is called Johnny Favorite, De Niro plays Louis Cyphre and there’s a jazz musician named Toots Sweet. Even the title turns out to be a terrible pun.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/24/2022
SPLICED PERSONALITY 