Tag Archives: movies

Reviewed: “Pillion” and “Crime 101”

20 Feb

“Crime 101”

Bart Layton’s neo-noir crime drama has a killer cast draped in a B-movie sheen.  The aloof antihero is Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth), who executes precise jewelry heists. Mike knows every detail of the courier or shop he’s knocking over and every job is done within a mile of LA’s 101 freeway, hence the name, shared with Don Winslow’s novella from which the movie is adapted.

Layton seamlessly weaves divergent threads that might otherwise have meandered. We meet Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), a detective who vexes his department head by pursuing justice and truth instead of closing cases, and Sharon Combs (Halle Berry), an insurance investigator who also is up against it with her corporate hierarchy. Berry could have given her character the pop, sizzle and verve of Vicki Anderson (Fay Dunaway) in the brilliant 1968 version of “The Thomas Crown Affair.” Berry instead plays Sharon as a woman who was once all that but has been worn down by sexism, misogyny and promises broken.

Still, she’s good at her job. So is Mike. Astute at assessing risk, he turns down the next job from his handler (Nick Nolte), who pitches it to Orman (Barry Keoghan), a punkish up-and-comer whose methods are far different from Mike’s. The things bad bosses do to good employees will have you wishing Mike, Lou and Sharon had an HR department to lodge a complaint with.

The taut script gives the ensemble rich material, shaping characters more deeply than seems possible in their brief time on screen. Hemsworth is especially good as Mike, switching from socially awkward to debonair as the job demands it. His troubled past bubbles up as he starts to date a young publicist (Monica Barbaro, who steals a few scenes). Layton and crew tie things up neatly, but the ending is where the movie is least compelling. The gems in “Crime 101” are stashed along the road.

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Frederick Wiseman, chronicler of democratic society

19 Feb

Fred Wiseman (left) and Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi at the Coolidge Corner Theater (Claire Vail).

Frederick Wiseman, the critically revered documentarian whose films mapped the moral frame of American life, died Monday at 96 at his home near Porter Square, in the city he in many ways, spent a career studying.

Born in Boston in 1930 and trained as a lawyer (Yale Law and a stint in the army) before turning to filmmaking, Wiseman carried a jurist’s sensibility into cinema — gathering evidence, observing behavior, withholding judgment. His camera did not accuse; it revealed. His body of work may be one of the most sustained portraits of modern democratic society ever assembled on film.

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Reviewed: “David,” “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” and “The Wrecking Crew”

15 Feb

“David”

Written and directed by Brent Dawes and Phil Cunningham, “David”’s animation is on par with Pixar. It sticks to the part of the Biblical story that chronicles the rise of the young shepherd and poet who would become the unifying King of Israel. Of course, David slays Goliath, repels the Philistines, deals with King Saul’s January 6th cling to power and ultimately makes Jerusalem the capital of Israel — all this around 1,000 BC. David (well voiced by Brandon Engman) is an earnest, reluctant leader full of brio, no matter the tall odds.

Scenes of battle and violent conflict are tres G-rated—think fights in “The Lion King.” As David matures as a military leader, he is not the conflicted warrior king depicted in the streaming series “House of David” and the Bible itself, the one who commits adultery with Bathsheba and subsequently hatches a plot to kill her husband. No, this David often breaks into song and follows prophecy to the letter. It’s crisp animation and tight story-telling.

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Reviewed: “Melania”

3 Feb

Visual appeal but not much to say

Muse Films

For “Melania,” Amazon MGM Studios spent $75 million to bring us what can at best be called a smug, self-aggrandizing video diary. Of that money, only an estimated $5 million was spent on the production. The initial $40 million payment was a license fee for the film and a ‘docu-series’ to run later, of which, Melania Trump reportedly received $28 million, with another $35 million being spent on marketing —i.e., the ad campaign we had to suffer through during the Patriots playoff run. Considering it’s arguably the most expensive documentary ever made, is it any good?

The answer is a qualified “meh.”

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Reviewed: “Send Help” and “Arco”

1 Feb

“Send Help”

Eyeballs are gouged, testicles put to a blade, and blood spurts in this Sam Rami film. It’s not quite as gory as Rami’s “Evil Dead” films, but it is not exactly shy. Rachel McAdams, dorked out with greasy hair and frumpy clothes, plays an office drone at some cutting-edge tech company. Linda Little is a numbers geek, apt to rise from her cubicle and chat up her bosses with tuna fish smeared to her upper lip. Bradley Preston (played by Dylan O’Brien of “Maze Runner”), becomes Linda’s new boss after his father dies (“Evil Dead”’s Bruce Campbell). Bradley, the jerk, welches on a promised promotion and relocates her to a new Bangkok office. Linda learns of the betrayal en route to Thailand with Bradley and his biz-school bros. The plane goes down, and Linda—a “Survivor” aficionado who has dreamed of a role on the show—suddenly becomes indispensable in hunting, kindling and scavenging. The sex-and-power reversal evokes Ruben Östlund’s darker “Triangle of Sadness” (2022). But “Send Help,” driven by flimsy pretexts for improbable hidden agendas, takes a softer bite of social commentary. The film has Linda and Bradley transitioning from uneasy codependency to something resembling “Lord of the Rings” without earning it. What begins as an empowerment fantasy grows banal. “Send Help” is whimsically entertaining. McAdams’s bravado carries the paunchy plot. 

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“The Rip” needs stitching while “H is for Hawk” soars

27 Jan

“The Rip”

With a cast of Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Teyana Taylor, Kyle Chandler and Stephen Yeun, one couldn’t possibly go wrong, right? All but one have been nominated for, or won, an Academy Award. Alas, in “The Rip,” writer/director Joe Carnahan (“Boss Level,” “Copshop”), bobbles the ball here with an overly complicated script that confusingly employs misdirection.

Cambridge besties Affleck and Damon play Miami detectives J.D. Byrne and Dane Druthers, who are caught up in the aftermath of another detective (Lina Esco) being executed while investigating the “stash house” of a drug cartel. Byrne and Druthers are brought in for questioning about the murder. But they also have a lead on the house and assemble a crew of trusted associates (Taylor, Yuen, and Catalina Sandino Moreno) to move in.

Inside they find only a young woman (Sasha Calle) house-sitting what she says is the property of her recently deceased grandmother. When $20 million in bills is found in plastic paint buckets in the attic, she claims ignorance. Druthers takes everyone’s cellphone while he “figures thing out,” then, a-la “Assault on Precinct 13,” the streets around the abode go vacant, telephone pole lights start to blink and a barrage of bullets fly. The sum of “the rip” (confiscated drug money) was initially purported by intel to be 150K, so right away we know something’s off and that one of the crew is the rat that killed Esco’s cop and is trying to abscond with the green. As suspicions rise, hidden agendas surface and outside forces add to the pressure point. The result is a clunkier “Reservoir Dogs” (1992) or “The Usual Suspects” (1995). Affleck and Damon lean into their parts, though most of the rest of the cast, save Calle, hang in the orbit of their swagger. That’s part of the problem with this big budget escape room caper – it’s more about muscle than character or intrigue. You really want to like “The Rip,” but its stitching is too loose. 

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Reviewed: “Resurrection,” “No Other Choice” and “We Bury the Dead”

9 Jan

“Resurrection”

Bi Gan’s dazzling, cerebral sci-fi phantasm folds memory, myth and cinematic form into a single, dream-logic tapestry. Set in a future in which humanity has traded the ability to dream for immortality, “Resurrection” follows the last remaining “deliriant” (Jackson Yee), a Frankenstein-like being still capable of dreaming, and the woman (Shu Qi) tasked with entering his subconscious to retrieve buried truths. What unfolds is an episodic odyssey through visions shaped by Chinese history, genre homage and shifting perspectives. It’s a visually sensual smorgasbord told in chapters aligning with a different sense and narrative style — we begin with German expressionism and wind up with one of the most stunning long shots ever projected on a screen. It’s bathed ominously in languid red and takes place in a trash-strewn, cyberpunk part of the city that hosts a vampire lair where a young punker (Yee again, who plays five roles — one per sense) has come to profess his love for a mercurial chanteuse (Gengxi Li) This bold, poetic nightmare resonates with humanity and wonder. “Resurrection” should be expressly seen on the big screen to drink in Gan’s riveting dreamscape meander.

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Reviewed: ‘It Was Just An Accident,’ ‘Eden’ and ‘The Great Flood’

4 Jan

“It Was Just An Accident”

The latest from Iranian director and noted dissident Jafar Panahi is something more contrived and ambitious than his normal quietly observant style — de facto cinéma vérité in its oblique shining of the light on the oppressive nature of Iran’s theocracy. Take “Offside” (2006), “This is Not a Film” (2011) — made while under house arrest when Panahi was banned from making films — or his masterwork, “The Circle” (2000), with its zinger of a reveal that women in what seems to be a social setting are in fact in jail for the equivalent of jaywalking or speeding.


In his first film since being released from prison in 2023, Panahi engages a stage-like convention akin to something Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges,” “The Banshees of Inisherin”) might cook up, set in our world but with the players seemingly acting in their own absurdist universe. An auto mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), recognizes Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), whom he believes tortured him while in prison. Vahid employs the flat of a shovel during a traffic confrontation in the middle of a busy street to render Eghbal pliable and whisk him into his windowless van. The big tell is that the victimizer had a prosthetic leg, as does Eghbal. But Vahid was blindfolded and only know his assailant from the feel and hollowness of the leg. To ensure he has the right man, Vahid enlists the aid of others tortured by “Peg Leg” — all, likewise blindfolded. It’s an existential jurisprudence conundrum as the victims ride around in Vahid’s van bursting into bouts of rage and uncertainty as they debate what to do with their alleged former torturer, bound and gagged and locked in a tool chest in the back of the van.

The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year, and it will make many best-of lists (as it should) but it is atypical Panahi, rich in production values and gingerly plotted, something that Panahi’s other films — seeking to skirt government censorship — avoided in their raw, natural, unflinching lens.

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The Best Films of 2025

28 Dec

If 2025 proved anything, it’s that cinema remains most alive when it resists easy definition. This was a year of films that slipped between categories — between art-house and genre (”Sinners,” “Bring Her Back”), intimacy and spectacle (”Resurrection”), sincerity and provocation — often in the same breath. The most compelling work didn’t shout its importance; it lingered, unsettled (”Die My Love,” “Sorry Baby”), and quietly reoriented how we look at the world, and at ourselves (One Battle After Another).

This was a year shaped less by consensus hits (”Fire and Ash” noted) than by films that demanded engagement–”Sinners” per se. Stories of grief (”Hamnet”), obsession, identity, and endurance unfolded in unexpected registers: tender where you expected bombast (”The Life of Chuck”), abrasive where comfort once reigned (”If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”). Even familiar auteurs–Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Coogler, Richard Linklater and Chloé Zhao to name a few–arrived with sharpened (or re-honed in the case of Zhao) instincts, pushing past their own signatures to interrogate aging, memory, power, and the quiet violence of love. Meanwhile, emerging voices (Eva Victor, “Sorry Baby”) brought urgency and texture, reminding us that cinema’s future is not only global, but defiantly personal. Female debuts behind the lens resonated in 2025, others being Mary Bronstein (“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), Kristen Stewart (“Chronology of Water”), Kate Winslet (“Goodbye Jane”), “CSI” icon Mariska Hargitay (“My Mom Jayne”) and kind of (she co-directed a film with “Anora” helmer Sean Baker some 20 years ago), Shih-Ching Tsou (“Left-Handed Girl”).

If there’s a through-line to 2025, it’s an insistence on presence — emotional, political, and sensory. Films that ask us to sit with discomfort, to embrace ambiguity, and to find meaning not in resolution but in reckoning. They linger long after the credits roll, less concerned with tidy conclusions than with the residue they leave behind.

This year’s top 10 isn’t about consensus or cultural dominance. It’s a snapshot of a moment when filmmakers trusted audiences to lean in, to feel deeply, and to meet the work halfway. In a year defined by uncertainty and recalibration, these films reminded us why we keep returning to the dark: not for escape, but for illumination.

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Reviewed ‘Endless Cookie,’ ‘Song Sung Blue’ and ‘Marty Supreme’

26 Dec



‘Endless Cookie’ (2025)

In my side hustle as a social justice film programmer, I’ve learned a lot about how other traditions tell stories. For some Indigenous filmmakers, the concept isn’t so much beginning, middle and end, but the ever-undulating cycles of life, family history and lore – with some culminations, but also always new beginnings. I can’t think of a better crystallization than this uplifting animated documentary by Seth Scriver and half-brother Pete revolving around taped conversations between the two detailing Pete’s struggles with schizophrenia. Seth is white, Pete is biracial (white and Indigenous), fluent in Cree and lives on the Shamattawa First Nation reserve in Manitoba. “Endless Cookie” is something of a mind-blower, gonzo and a bit meta. Among its digressions and side stories is a thread of Seth forever chasing funds to finish his film; indeed, it took more than eight years to make. But the matters at the core are isolation, addiction, colonialism and the harmful impacts on generations of Indigenous people, done in vivid, hand-drawn animation by Seth that makes Adult Swim look tame; the characters are all some freaky cool combination of human, dog and veggies, conceptual neighbors to SpongeBob or the Aqua Teen Hunger Force. The title comes from that cyclical notion of life, but there is a character in the film called Cookie, who, as you might guess, is a sugary confection with legs and plenty of attitude. It’s a kind of anti-Pixar (no offense) adult animated film reminiscent of last year’s Oscar-nominated “Robot Dreams,” and this past weekend “Cookie” won Best Animated Film from the Boston Society of Film Critics.

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