“A shrewd deployment of two formulas for which I am a total sucker, combining the underdog sports movie with the inspirational teacher saga to tell the true story of a misfit Miami high school that became the first inner-city team to win a national chess championship. You won’t find many surprises here, but these tropes are so familiar because they work.” – North Shore Movies, 09/08/2020
“The film’s centerpiece is a dazzlingly discomfiting visit with Plemons’ parents. It’s a sequence for anybody who ever wished the chicken dinner scene in Eraserhead had gone on for an hour, full of ominous portents, offhanded insults and boisterous belly laughs that act as pressure release valves for an almost unbearable tension.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 09/03/2020
“It’s a sometimes startlingly sexy movie, but even the eroticism is tinged with unease. Or maybe I’m just being a little overprotective of Olivia, as despite her tough, exterior shell I haven’t feared for a fictional character like this in some time. Sandoval’s eyes offer fleeting glimpses of subjects she would rather not talk about right now, thank you very much.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 08/26/2020
“The Press purportedly operated out of the Puck Building where bohemian Greenwich Village met the skanky Lower East Side, and in its pages gave every indication of being a lunatic asylum run by degenerates and drunkards of formidable intellect, unencumbered by any overriding ideology or boundaries of good taste. To my mind, the ideal alt-weekly.” – North Shore Movies, 08/26/2020
“Another anonymous widget from the assembly line of direct-to-video thrillers during which Bruce Willis sits around sulking. He’s made more than a dozen of these in the past five years alone, here moping his way through his umpteenth single-location action picture surrounded by terrorists and unable to disguise his contempt for the material. Can’t say that I blame him.” – North Shore Movies, 08/22/2020
“Tesla kills biopics dead. Interrupting itself for fact-checks and inserting playful anachronisms throughout, this portrait of the perpetually thwarted 19th-century inventor implores us to think beyond facile reproductions of what the subject did and instead meditate on what Nikola Tesla means. It’s the most radical deconstruction of the genre since I’m Not There.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 08/20/2020
“AMC might be talking a big game right now about their new Clorox procedures, but darn near every time I’ve been to one of their cinemas I spend half the movie in the lobby trying to tell somebody what’s wrong with the picture or sound. If they’re as serious about safety as they are about presentation, we’ll all be dead before anyone can spoil the surprise twists in Tenet.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 08/19/2020
“A work of great sumptuousness and visual sophistication. Few films in recent years have depicted class alienation so acutely, with Naïma and Sofia always on the ends of withering glares from servers and the hired help. The screenplay constantly complicates these characters’ loyalties to provocative ends. There’s nothing easy about it at all.“ – North Shore Movies, 08/18/2020
“Wolf’s interviews with actresses are so good you wind up wishing he’d narrowed the focus of the overcrowded film entirely onto them. From Mamie Van Doren to Shannon Elizabeth, he’s got generations of ingenues telling tales of exploitation and empowerment, and for every rightfully embittered Linda Blair there’s a proud Pam Grier.” – North Shore Movies, 08/18/2020
“Oliver Stone is a larger-than-life character who sees himself as a figure of modern myth. He’s often ridiculous but not entirely wrong. His compulsively readable new memoir Chasing The Light chronicles the first half of Stone’s career with the kind of gonzo grandeur and go-for-broke immediacy that defined his early films. I couldn’t put it down.” – North Shore Movies, 08/16/2020
SPLICED PERSONALITY 