“Hudson is up to the formidable task, belting her heart out in an otherwise boilerplate Hollywood product. Respect is about as good as a conventional musical biopic can be while still being a conventional musical biopic. There are worse ways to spend two-and-a-half hours than listening to Jennifer Hudson sing Aretha Franklin songs.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 08/12/2021
“Sure, they say the ‘f-word’ a lot, but never the Matt Damon one. These characters cuss constantly without uttering anything actually offensive. The eviscerations are weightless and without consequence, in a movie that for all its naughty posturing is about as dangerous as a trip to the mall, with production design by Hot Topic and bad jokes from Spencer’s Gifts.” – North Shore Movies, 08/05/2021
“A passionately overheated melodrama about creativity and cruelty, it is by turns, an ecstatic and intensely alienating experience. Annette might not be a movie for everybody, but setting $15 million on fire for such a singular, crackpot vision strikes me as a far more productive waste of Amazon’s money than sending a divorced billionaire to space.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 08/03/2021
“A strange landscape that sometimes seems to move in slow motion, full of uncanny, unexplained incidents and haunted interludes. Buyer beware: It owes less to Game Of Thrones and more to acid Westerns like El Topo and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. What’s transfixing is the eerie, immersive vibe. This is the kind of movie you get lost in for a little while.” – North Shore Movies, 08/03/2021
“Now I’m not saying the third act is quite as crazily stupid as The Cobbler, but it’s recognizably the work of the same writer. This is the kind of movie someone makes after winning a mantle full of awards, when nobody in their orbit dares second-guess a so-called genius. Stillwater wants to be a lot of things at once and manages to be bad at all of them.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/29/2021
“Few films are blessed with the sense of discovery captured in these ramshackle reels. Wild Style is a fanciful first draft of a cultural history play-acted by the same people who created the culture in the first place. It’s a winning bit of self-mythology by folks who were there on the ground floor, adorable in it’s amateurish ardor and endless optimism.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/22/2021
“Constructed like one of the scrapbooks we see the star making from his old newspaper and magazine clippings, this wistful, often awfully sad documentary drifts from past to present and back again, cutting to devastating effect from contemporary footage of this frail, enfeebled figure to home movie memories of the golden god with that insolent smirk.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/21/2021
“I understand it must be difficult to photograph Megan Fox in such a way that does not make her look like a sex doll come to life, but nonetheless, the amount of screen time Emmett devotes to her being choked makes it start to feel like a fetish film. I found myself envying Bruce Willis, who didn’t have to be around for any of this. Not even the scenes that he’s in.” – North Shore Movies, 07/21/2021
“The extreme strangeness of Nicolas Cage’s physical presence can sometimes be a problem in movies. He can’t play regular people anymore, but then regular people can’t play the kinds of roles Nic Cage likes to play these days. His otherworldliness is part of the text, used to brilliant effect here by Sarnoski as a sort of wandering, samurai philosopher.” – North Shore Movies, 07/16/2021
“Increasingly petty and distasteful as it wears on, Roadrunner becomes less a portrait of a troubled genius and more a snippy tell-all about a television crew getting fed up with their mercurial star. I was worried I might be being oversensitive because of my enormous admiration for Bourdain’s work, so I watched the movie a second time and liked it even less.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/15/2021
SPLICED PERSONALITY 