“Here we go again with the grief. I feel like I just wrote this review a week ago for Fall but it bears repeating that not every survival movie needs to be a therapy session. When they inevitably remake Jaws in a few years it’s gonna be all about Brody coming to terms with some tragic nautical trauma in his past instead of just killing the shark because it eats people.” – North Shore Movies, 08/22/2022
“With a lush Pino Donaggio score referencing a whole history of sultry Italian thrillers, I think maybe the movie is trying to undercut erotic intrigue with chain restaurant banality. There’s so much dead air and aimless standing around I just assumed the project was an improvisational exercise, and was later aghast to learn that an actual screenplay had been written.” – North Shore Movies, 08/22/2022
“Looser and less self-important than it sounds in synopsis, Buck And The Preacher wears its historical import lightly, with an easy humor that confounded more than a few critics. By this point in his career, the Oscar-winning Poitier’s name had become synonymous with a certain sort of prestige picture starchier than this. It’s a film of simple, sturdy pleasures.” – Crooked Marquee, 08/19/2022
“But sometimes folks go to the movies just because we like to watch people fall in love, and the scorching chemistry between Swayze and Grey (who by all accounts didn’t care for each other’s company off-camera) is enough to crush petty plot concerns or any questions about how they could be dancing to instruments that haven’t been invented yet.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/18/2022
Honored to be invited by my buddy Blake Howard to remember the late, great James Caan’s iconic performance in Michael Mann’s Thief, chatting in the incredible company of Jim Belushi, Jen Johans, Alexi Toliopoulos, S.A. Cosby, Travis Woods, Jordan Harper, Jedidiah Ayres, William Boyle, Bilge Ebiri, Walter Chaw and Scott Derrickson. – One Heat Minute, 08/17/2022
“E.T. is one of the purest and most emotionally direct of all American movies, with not a whit of adult condescension nor any self-protecting irony. Spielberg’s brilliantly subjective camerawork forces even the most jaded and cynical viewers back into the perspective of a child, which might be why it hits grown-ups so much harder than kids.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/11/2022
“I suppose one could argue that Sara DeLappe’s tart, cruelly amusing screenplay is shooting fish in a barrel. But some of us have had it up to here with movies that are more like group hugs and the annoyingly popular insistence that art has to be somehow aspirational, so it’s refreshing when a film comes along that’s this content to be a bitch.” – North Shore Movies, 08/11/2022
“An intensely nerve-wracking experience for acrophobics like yours truly. Fall’s attempts at character-driven drama are fumbling at best, but it hardly matters because the situation is such a goddamn nightmare I watched the film curled up in the fetal position on my couch, palms sweating profusely and testicles ascended to somewhere above my sternum.” – North Shore Movies, 08/11/2022
“It’s a smart concept, stripping the series of its increasingly unwieldly sci-fi world-building and sending it satisfyingly back to basics for a breathless run through the woods, pitting the sophisticated alien weaponry against primitive bows-and-arrows and plucky human ingenuity. You also get to see the Predator fight a bear. Which is awesome.” – North Shore Movies, 08/06/2022
“An achingly beautiful cautionary tale about the blindness of privilege, a movie rich with longing and loss. It’s impossible to watch The Garden Of The Finzi-Continis in today’s political climate without feeling a chill every time the characters shrug off another sign of encroaching authoritarianism, blithely believing such horrors couldn’t possibly happen so close to home.” – Crooked Marquee, 08/05/2022
SPLICED PERSONALITY 