“As is the case with most late-period Allen pictures, A Rainy Day In New York is much better directed than written. The flaws are all right there on the surface but its virtues run somewhere deeper. It’s infused with a melancholy longing for a lost era that we know never existed in the first place, yet yearn for all the same. I like it more than I probably should.” – North Shore Movies, 11/19/2020
“There’s really no possible way to overstate how alienating and bizarre the opening ten minutes of this program are, just watching the Wookiees putter around and moan. It’s so anti-entertaining as to border on the avant-garde. Carrie Fisher claimed she had one of the only extant original copies and used to put it on at parties, when she wanted people to leave.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/16/2020
“Our cultural associations with Mel Gibson have become so unpleasant in recent years that casting him as a miserable asshole Santa Claus is a gag so good there’s probably no way any movie could do it justice. Putting the snarling nastiness of Gibson’s present-day, walking-cigarette-butt persona in the service of jolly sentiments is a joke that writes itself.” – North Shore Movies, 11/13/2020
“Loren commands the screen with the same leonine ferocity she brought to De Sica’s Two Women some sixty years ago. The tough old broad and the crafty street urchin is a mismatch as old as movies themselves, and the pleasures of the film lie in how confidently it embraces these timeless tropes with just a few tweaks to bring the story into the present day.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/13/2020
“Cronenberg’s relentlessly gnarly thriller comes with a pulverizing soundscape of echoes and screams. Slicker and less cerebral than his father’s work, the film nonetheless contains familiar fixations on the loss of identity when technology merges with the new flesh, as well as an ick factor through the roof. In other words, the kid’s a chip off the old block.” – North Shore Movies, 11/13/2020
“The Coolidge Corner Theatre’s Virtual Screening Room has just started streaming a new 4K restoration of Federico Fellini’s 1954 masterpiece. One of the greatest of all films, this haunting, heartfelt fable feels like a balm during these troubled times, its essential, insistent humanity arriving as a reminder right when we need it most.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/03/2020
“White Noise trusts the viewer enough to treat us like adults who can see for ourselves the vast emptiness in the lives of these people, their intense need for the validation of strangers and how desperately they cling to the notion of birthright superiority because they have no other ideas or accomplishments of which to speak.” – North Shore Movies, 10/31/2020
“Like Western Stars, the film was shot at Springsteen’s ranch in New Jersey by director Thom Zimny, alternating excellent performance footage in Bruce’s home studio with slightly gaseous oratory as the camera caresses his property’s exteriors. I’m not sure I’d quite call it ‘a movie,’ but this is one of the more soulful promotional items you’ll come across.” – North Shore Movies, 10/31/2020
“The Fall Focus kicks off with Minari, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this past January’s Sundance Film Festival. It’s a wonderful, warm-hearted movie about a Korean family that moves to the outskirts of rural Arkansas in pursuit of the American dream. ‘This was one of my favorite films at Sundance, which feels like 12 years ago,’ Campbell enthuses.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/27/2020
“Coppola has perhaps too dreamy a disposition for the snap of screwball comedy, allowing space to study the ripples a teardrop makes in a half-empty martini glass. On The Rocks is a beguilingly personal picture, with the First Daughter of American cinema making a movie about a woman trying to find her own light in the shadow of a larger-than-life dad.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/22/2020
SPLICED PERSONALITY 