“Copping some neat mid-century modern looks from Mad Men, but with contemporary hairstyles and idioms so as not to alienate youngsters, it’s the MCU’s usual M.O. of staying grounded in a deliberately drab, everyday reality. These muted Pop Art colors don’t even pop, because the last thing you’d want from a Fantastic Four movie is for things to get too fantastical.” – North Shore Movies, 07/22/2025
“More of a mood than a movie, conjuring the weirdly sluggish banality of life during an emergency – the way the whole world seems to be hurrying up to wait – as well as the odd resignation with which we humans are adapting to our ongoing climate catastrophe. It has a kind of hazy, languorous vibe that’s keyed into the Florida humidity and hot rain.” – North Shore Movies, 07/18/2025
“Eddington has something to offend (or annoy) just about everybody. The movie skewers sacred cows and picks low-hanging fruit, offering bluntly amusing sights like a young white girl lecturing a Black cop about systemic oppression, or Phoenix with a campaign sign that reads: ‘Your being manipulated.’ Aster is trying to cram in all the absurdity of our recent history.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/17/2025
“Other directors tell stories. Robert Altman explored ecosystems. No filmmaker more playfully examined the hierarchies in which we humans like to arrange ourselves, every movie a bustling community that seemed more discovered than staged. Altman’s improv-heavy, overlapping dialogue and roving camera made his films feel caught on the fly.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/14/2025
It was my great privilege to be the dumb guy talking to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Henry James scholar Megan Marshall after WBUR CitySpace’s Set In Boston screening of Merchant Ivory’s The Bostonians. Topics included the difficulties of shooting at the Athenaeum and how the movie tries to put an inspirational spin on the novel’s downbeat ending. – WBUR CitySpace, 07/11/2025
“Beverly Hills Cop is an extremely easy film to watch, floating from scene to scene on the characters’ chemistry and Murphy’s incandescent charisma. The generic crime story makes it even cozier, with familiar beats that don’t take too much focus away from the people we’re enjoying. You can see why it was #1 at the box office for 14 weeks. The movie is good company.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/11/2025
“Basically a Guardians Of The Galaxy movie in different costumes, with everyone being breezily nonchalant around garishly colored space creatures and indulging in occasional flights of po-faced sentimentality. But what works in the Marvel quip factory doesn’t mesh with the Man of Steel. There’s no awe in this Superman, no magnificence.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/10/2025
Joined my dear friend Jen Johans to discuss the eminently quotable Withnail And I, confessing how the first time I saw the movie I identified with Marwood but as the years went on I realized I’d become Withnail. I guess the next stop is Monty. Also, the great William Boyle on Jean De Florette and Manon Of The Spring plus our buddy Blake Howard on Chungking Express. – Watch With Jen, 07/07/2025
“The deathless dinosaur franchise is now on its seventh installment, a breezily uninspired piece of hackwork that passes past our eyes with a shrug. Director Gareth Edwards brings a rote semi-professionalism to the proceedings. ‘How many more times are we gonna do this?’ are the first words you hear in Jurassic World Rebirth. It’s a valid question.” – North Shore Movies, 07/03/2025
“An uncommonly astute and sometimes shockingly funny movie about the numbing aftereffects of trauma, that sticky sense of stasis while the rest of the world moves on without you. Situated in a perpetual present tense, Eva Victor’s hugely accomplished debut isn’t a film about The Bad Thing, but about how life goes on before, after and all around it.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/02/2025
SPLICED PERSONALITY 