“If you don’t find sub-Tarantino schtick like professional killers discussing children’s television inherently hilarious this could end up being the longest ride of your life. In fact, if there’s a joke that doesn’t land for you in Bullet Train, you’d better learn to love it anyway, because it’s gonna get repeated ad infinitum over the next two hours and change.” – North Shore Movies, 08/05/2022
“As an uptight executive rocked by the re-appearance of her abusive former lover, Rebecca Hall gives a performance so ferocious and overdetermined I’m not surprised to hear it being hailed as a tour-de-force. The lanky British thespian is one of the hardest working actresses in showbiz, or maybe more accurately, one of the hardest acting actresses in show business.” – North Shore Movies, 08/05/2022
“A rock-solid example of old-fashioned Hollywood craftsmanship, Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives hums along with a brisk, all-business efficiency. The film takes its emotional temperature from the stiff-upper-lip professionalism of the rescue divers, with a brusque aversion to schmaltz that’s a surprise coming from this particular director.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/04/2022
“Altman’s so-called heresy was actually a logical extension of Chandler’s vision of Marlowe as the last hurrah for chivalry in a fallen, postwar world that’s moved beyond moral concerns. Gould is grubby but gallant, a decent guy surrounded by sharks and betrayed for having faith in his fellow man. His best friend describes him as a born loser. He even loses his cat.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/29/2022
“’It’s easy in our lives to see the people we meet as characters. Even in your own friend group, you know? He’s the drunk. She’s the party girl. He’s the one who gives me advice.’ Vengeance is about a man coming to realize that the people around him are actually much more complicated than the characters he’s assigned them to play on his podcast.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/27/2022
”This storybook romance was messy from the start. People got hurt. The Last Movie Stars doesn’t skimp on the unsavory details – the fighting, philandering and drinking – but doesn’t dwell on them, either. One comes away with a sense of two difficult people who loved each other so much they eventually found a way to work it out, but it wasn’t easy.” – North Shore Movies, 07/27/2022
“The irony is not lost on our star-crossed couple that the primary ethnic rivalry is between Indians who have never been to India and African Americans who have never been to Africa. Family traditions are seen as both a blessing and a curse, providing much-needed support to minorities in an unwelcoming country while also keeping them walled off from each other.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/22/2022
“A throwback to funny Friday night fright flicks like Tremors or Signs, Peele’s latest is an audience picture full of good, old-fashioned jump scares and blessed with an economy of scale. How refreshing to see a summer sci-fi blockbuster in which the fate of the world doesn’t hang in the balance. It’s just a few colorful characters trying to not get eaten by a monster.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/20/2022
“Lancaster was never more moving onscreen than when he was lying to himself, and there are shades of his shattering performance as John Cheever’s The Swimmer in Lou’s tall tales of his glory days. ‘You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean back then,’ he rhapsodizes, hilariously, as if even the sea were somehow now diminished like everything else.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/15/2022
“The feature debut of Homecoming showrunner Eli Horowitz wants to be a horror movie about the desperate lengths to which people will go to avoid aging in a culture only interested in youth. That the film features a 50-year-old lead who doesn’t look a day over 35 is either egregious miscasting or a level of irony too sophisticated for this reviewer to grasp.” – North Shore Movies, 07/15/2022
SPLICED PERSONALITY 