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‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ is an epic sequel

20 Dec

Bigger, longer and uncut could be the tagline for James Cameron’s latest “Avatar” chapter, “Fire and Ash,” which at three hours and 17 minutes is five minutes longer than 2022’s “Way of Water” and 35 more than the 2009 first film in the series, still the all-time top at the box office at nearly $3 billion in ticket sales. Where the franchise is going seems to be one long continuous saga akin to the J.R.R. Tolkien films (“Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings”).

“Fire and Ash” picks up a year after “Way of Water,” with the nefarious Resources Development Administration still hunting the whalelike tulkun for amrita, a substance in their brains coveted by rich humans back on Earth for its antiaging effects. Unobtainium – such a great and obvious name for a super metal – was the object of corporate greed in the 2009 original, but now seems to be an afterthought. Back then, to gain control of the resource-rich planet Pandora, the RDA sent in the Marines to expel the indigenous Na’vi, the 10-foot tall, blue-skinned humanoids with cool prehensile tails and limpid yellow eyes, who were in the way of the extractive mining. Now beyond pillaging the sea, it feels like Pandora might be a good spot for humans to relocate, as Earth has become dangerously close to depletion (we’re circa 2150). Intergalactic colonization isn’t a new cinematic concept, to be sure, but Pandora has air that is toxic to humans. They must wear oxygen masks to get around.

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The Cambridge woman who gives locals their moment of fame

15 Dec

Angela Peri of the Boston Casting talent firm.

When Hollywood comes to town to make a “Boston movie,” like 2023’s “The Holdovers” starring Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa, finding the faces in the crowd is often the job of Boston Casting, the biggest such agency in the Boston area.

Boston Casting was founded in 1990 by fifth-generation Cantabrigian Angela Peri. Over a croissant and chai at the Iggy’s Bread cafe in Huron Village, Imagine, Peri walked me through her story.

She’s a Cambridge Rindge and Latin School alum who was bitten by the acting bug. Though her mother discouraged the pursuit, Peri went to Los Angeles and Italy and dabbled in the business as a makeup artist, comedian and bit performer. She brushed elbows with Denis Leary and Ellen DeGeneres on the L.A. comedy scene and, while in Italy, graced the screen ever so briefly in “Cinema Paradiso” (1988), the Academy Award-winning love letter to community movie houses.

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Remembering Charles Coe, poet, musician and connector

5 Dec

By Tom Meek

Saturday, November 29, 2025

Cantabrigian teacher and poet Charles Coe died Friday Nov. 21.

The spirit of creativity in Cambridge dimmed last week when longtime resident, teacher and poet Charles Coe died Monday from complications related to prostate cancer surgery. His death was sudden and stunned many. In addition to touching people with his words, often delivered in a deep, mellifluous baritone, Coe offered mentorship, leadership and a sense of community. He was 73.

He was an omnipresent figure in local literary circles: the Mass Poetry Festival, long-running literary salons across Cambridge and Somerville, the Writers’ Room, Black Writers Reading series, arts advocacy boards. If there was a gathering where people were wrestling with words or art or community, chances were good Coe had either helped organize it or slipped quietly into a seat to listen.

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Harvard Square sees the light again

5 Dec

By Tom Meek

Friday, December 5, 2025

The restored lighting at the Christian Science Reading Room on Church Street in Cambridge’s Harvard Square.

A burst of brightness came to a gloomy stretch of Church Street last month as the Christian Science Reading Room restored soft white art deco lighting absent from the building’s facade for decades.
The lights returned to Church Street, across from the long-dormant AMC Loews Harvard Square, at a Nov. 7 unveiling. Pictures of the alluring illumination have become a slow-trending wave on local social media.

“Now when you see it, it catches your eye,” said Jason Fredette of Poyant Signs, the New Bedford company that restored the lighting over nine months. “The building looks totally different.”
The first structure at the site was a blacksmith shop in the late 1800s, later a veterinary practice. That became mixed retail at the turn of the century as Harvard Square became more thickly settled and the subway arrived in 1912, said Cambridge Historical Commission executive director Charles Sullivan. The 23 Church St. structure was razed in favor of the current one-story 1936 art deco design by architect William Laurence Galvin as a new, upscale home for Cambridge Gas and Electric Light Co.

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Reviewed: ‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,’ ‘Sisu: Road to Revenge” and ‘Eternity’

5 Dec

‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’ (2025)

The latest “Knives Out Mystery” serves up Josh O’Connor in his fourth feature this year – “The Mastermind,” “The History of Sound” and “Rebuilding” are the others – as a priest seeking to suss out a killer in a reclusive burg. (It was his part in last-year’s amped-up tennis drama “Challengers” that seemed to push the affable British actor to Hollywood’s must-have list.) Director Rian Johnson (“Brick,” “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”) attracts an A-list cast to these “Knives” projects and shoehorns their unique personas into unlikely parts, which is where the magic happens. The main trick is Bond boy Daniel Craig as the Southern-twanged sleuth Benoit Blanc. He’s one part Hercule Poirot and another part Columbo with a splash of fop and Inspector Clouseau goofiness stirred in. Blanc’s the engine for the series, but it’s the casting of that ensemble he must work his way through to find out whodunit that brings joy to each episode. Here we settle in at a quaint upstate New York rectory led by monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), a fire-and-brimstone kind of preacher with demonstrative Trumpian undertones. Others in the crew of suspects when one goes belly-up are Glenn Close as Martha Delacroix, a devout church lady and the monsignor’s stalwart ally; former bestselling sci-fi author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott); groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church); local attorney and church devotee Vera Draven (Kerry Washington); her adopted kid brother Cy (Daryl McCormack); smarmy doc and something of an Andrew Tate/Joe Rogan alt-right politico, Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner); and concert cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny, “Civil War’’). O’Connor’s reverend Jud is the fly in the ointment when he shows up to check in on the church. The murderous plot’s already afoot; after the first corpse crops up, Blanc’s called in by the local police chief (Mila Kunis). At two and a half hours, the film folds in on itself too many times for its own good. Many of the characters are too thinly drawn, and there are logical flaws such as footage from Cy’s mounted iPhone that’s problematic because he’s often in the frame holding the camera. O’Connor gets a passing grade as the main focus, but it’s Close and Craig that sell it. Not as tight as the first “Knives Out,” but still a passable “Murder by Death”-lite caper. 

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‘Hamnet’: Shakespeare in grief

27 Nov

The mere mention of the name Shakespeare and the conversation gets serious real fast. Gone for more than 400 years, the man has achieved transcendent cultural, intellectual and pop icon status. Who today could lay claim to such four centuries from now – Taylor Swift? Akira Kurosawa based the bulk of his samurai westerns on Shakespearean tragedies. “The Forbidden Planet” (1956), “10 Things I Hate About You” (1999) and “My Own Private Idaho” (1991) are just a handful of the many pop films based on the works by the Bard of Avon. The man himself was reimagined on screen in “Shakespeare in Love” (1998) and the lesser-known Kenneth Branagh outing, “All is True” (2018). Add to that “Hamnet,” a portrait of grief directed by Oscar winner Chloé Zhao and bolstered by strong performances from leads Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley.

It’s a heartfelt effort that despite the talent takes too long to find its wings. Drawn from Maggie O’Farrell’s much-ballyhooed 2020 novel – the author contributes to the script too – there’s a lot of emotion poured out onto the screen, seeking our sympathies without necessarily earning them. Much is obfuscated too, to the point of annoyance: The name Shakespeare is held back, so if you did not know the basis for the film, for much of it you’d see just an earnest young man (Mescal’s Will) lovestruck by his neighbor’s daughter (Buckley’s Agnes), a peculiar woman with witchy tendencies from a higher social strata.

Our smitten scribe is a tutor with scant financial resources, further saddled by the debts of his overbearing and quick-to-judge father. Money and class loom as impediments, yet Will professes his ardor with such conviction and eloquence that he and Agnes are allowed to wed (it helps that she is older and quirky to the point that her brother and father fear her becoming a spinster). They have three children – including twins Judith and the Hamnet of the film’s title.

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‘Sentimental Value’: Bad father, great filmmaker

22 Nov

Meta is all the rage these days in films about filmmakers and the filmmaking process. Take Richard Linklater’s ode to the French New Wave, “Nouvelle Vague” (available on Netflix), which follows a young Jean-Luc Godard in 1959 Paris seeking to make his first film (“Breathless”), or “Jay Kelly” from Noah Baumbach (“White Noise,” “Squid and the Whale”), in which George Clooney essentially plays George Clooney. Add to that Joachim Trier’s stirring “Sentimental Value,” about the creative tempest of filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), an auteur well into his autumn seeking to achieve one last cinematic masterpiece.

There’s not an ounce of fat in the script, the performances are tight and lived-in and Trier, hailed for his edgy, dramatic simmers “The Worst Person in the World” (2021) and “Oslo, August 31st” (2011), again proves masterful in presenting a slow, ever-mounting, emotionalism, a devilish dark humor and a climax of melancholy and rue. The movie gets to you from the inside out.

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Reviewed: ‘Train Dreams’ & ‘Left-Handed Girl’

20 Nov

‘Train Dreams’ (2025)

Films crafted around hermits are often peppered with idyllic framings of their lush surroundings and driven by strong, intense performances by the lead, who must, for the most part, connote much of their character’s inner turmoil via facial expressions and the glance of the eye. That was the case with Ben Foster in Debra Granik’s “Leave No Trace” (2018) as well as Daniel Day-Lewis in his recent comeback, “Anemone.” This film, gorgeously shot by Adolpho Veloso, has the trippy, hypnotic aura of a Terrence Malick fever dream, and we get Joel Edgerton in his richest and most robust performance to date. His Robert Grainier, we’re told, never spoke into a phone during a life that ends serenely in 1968. Based on the novella by Denis Johnson and adapted by Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar – the Oscar-nominated tandem behind “Sing Sing” – “Train Dreams” is pretty much the telling of Grainier’s life in full; orphaned young, unknowing what befell his parents, and, as a quiet young man when we catch up with him, working as a logger and railway hand in the remote reaches of Idaho. His life as a loner and drifter pretty much has him moving from one lumber camp to the next until he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones) at a church in Fry. It’s love at first pleasantry, and with Gladys game for the woods, the two wed, build a bungalow atop the crest of a dell and have a daughter. It’s an enchanting “Little House on the Prairie” existence until a wildfire sweeps through the valley while Grainier happens to be off on one of his logging missions. When he returns, Gladys and his daughter are nowhere to be found. For a good part of the film, Grainier, propelled by guilt and grief, searches nearby towns looking for them or any news of their fate. Ultimately he returns to the woods, where he registers a small degree of comfort taking in an abandoned litter of dogs and rebuilding the cabin on the same perch. The power of guilt and grief creeps in and begins to bend reality, and Grainier struggles to make sense of his existence and the world in large. The acting is top tier, reserved and quietly affecting. Others adding heart and humanity in small, meaty parts are William H. Macy as Arn Peeples, a grumpy coot who likes to use explosives to fell his trees, and Kerry Condon as the first woman to work at a U.S. National Forestry outpost.

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Reviewed: ‘One to One: John & Yoko,’ ‘Nouvelle Vague,’ ‘Hedda’ and ‘Lurker’

13 Nov

‘One to One: John & Yoko’ (2024)

The latest from Kevin Macdonald (“Touching the Void,” “Last King of Scotland”), working with Sam Rice-Edwards, delves into the life and times of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in New York City during the tumultuous Richard Nixon and Vietnam War era. It’s a spry, electric rewind with sharp, well-cut footage of the time and, naturally, the music and idealistic political activism of Lennon and Ono. Leaving their massive estate in London post-Beatles breakup, Lennon and Ono came to America to try to find Kyoko Chan Cox, Ono’s daughter from an earlier marriage to jazz musician Anthony Cox, who defied a court order and hid her from Ono. Lennon and Ono, in alignment with their ideology, opted to live “plainly” in the middle of New York – a decision that would factor into Lennon’s very public murder in 1980. The focus of the film is the “One to One” concert Lennon and Ono put on at Madison Square Garden in 1972 to benefit the children of the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, shut down in 1987 but at the time the largest institution in the country caring for children with Trisomy 21 and other developmental disabilities. The concert was a reaction to an exposé by Geraldo Rivera of the inhumane, overcrowded conditions – there was one caregiver for every 30 children (the concert’s title offers a better ratio), living in squalor on cold cement. What’s shown is horrific (think Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies”). Filling out the frame of this conflict-rich time capsule are the shenanigans of Nixon, the bravery of Shirley Chisholm and the kindness she extended to a wounded George Wallace, a jazzed-up Jerry Rubin, poet and defiant pacifist Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan and his controversial “garbologist,” A.J. Weberman. It’s a wild olio that captures the chaotic time with Lennon and Ono at the fore, on point and putting themselves out there in every sense of the word. You have to admire their cool, calm and rapier-sharp responses, especially Ono, fighting to see her daughter and often tagged “an ugly J*#!, who broke up the Beatles.” There’s a bit about Cambridge too, with Ono as a speaker at the First International Feminist Conference held at Harvard University. If you’re not left verklempt by the end sequence, of kids from Willowbrook in daylight, beaming, cross-cut with Lennon and Ono performing classics such as “Imagine” and “Come Together” with Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack, you need to get to the doctor to see if you have a heartbeat.

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Reviewed: ‘Die My Love,’ ‘Christy,’ ‘Nuremberg’ and ‘The Vortex’

9 Nov

‘Die My Love’ (2025)

Lynne Ramsay, the Scottish filmmaker behind such macabre psychological chillers as “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2011) and “You Were Never Really Here” (2017) – the former, about a youth who commits a mass school shooting, the latter with Joaquin Phoenix as a hammer-wielding sociopath-avenger – may be the most convincing female voice in matters of masculinity onscreen since Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker,” “A House of Dynamite”). And the company in that elite club may just be a crew of two. Here, going to the more feminine side of things doesn’t make anything less messy, violent or bloody. In fact, it’s more unsettling. No human being dies of a violent act, though animals – a horse and a poorly adjusted dog – don’t fare as well. Jennifer Lawrence is Grace, who has a lot pushing and pulling in her head. She’s a writer who’s moved into the old Montana farmhouse of her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) with the intent of sinking into creativity and new motherhood. Neither really happens as Grace becomes less and less rooted in reality and waking delusions take hold. Is Jackson having an affair? Is the menacing presence on a motorcycle (LaKeith Stanfield) also Grace’s moonlight lover in the rickety old barn? Or is it all an illusion cast by an unreliable narrator dealing with postpartum delirium, or something more chronic? Ramsay, working from Ariana Harwicz’s 2013 novel, keeps us in the dreamy, demented dark – when Grace crashes through a sliding glass door, opens the car door to jump or bashes her head into a hotel suite mirror and Jackson underreacts, you don’t know if this is par for the course, the man has no idea what to do and is simply silent and agog, if it’s a disjointed distortion of reality or somewhere in between. There are clues, but teasingly few. Lawrence gives a bold, brave performance, emotionally exposed and often naked, oddly like an antithetical companion piece to her 2023 dark comedy, “No Hard Feelings.” In “Mother!” (2017) the madness around Lawrence’s bearer of life was external and a metaphor for the religious patriarchy; here it’s internal, and troubling to the forces who can’t get a handle on or squash it – a forced commitment in an asylum seems to fix things for a moment, but did it really happen? The tension over what is real is the film’s weakness and appeal, but not enough can be said about Lawrence: She switches on and off, or explodes, or recedes, with seamless perfection. It’s stunning. Ramsay and Lawrence are in tune at every turn and we are lucky to be here for their deftly deliberate dissonance.

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