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      Sean Burns

      Sean Burns

      Tomatometer-approved critic
      Biography:

      Sean Burns is a film critic for WBUR’s Arts & Culture and a contributing writer at North Shore Movies and Crooked Marquee. He was Philadelphia Weekly’s lead film critic from 1999 through 2013, and worked as a contributing editor at The Improper Bostonian from 2006 until 2014. His reviews, interviews and essays have also appeared in Metro, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, The Boston Herald, Nashville Scene, Time Out New York, Philadelphia City Paper and RogerEbert.com.

      Publications:

      Movies reviews only

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      Rating T-Meter Title | Year Review
      Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) Leone’s gloriously inflated epic isn’t just any old Western. It’s all of them. - Crooked Marquee
      Read More | Posted May 26, 2023
      Monica (2022) ‘Monica’ feels like a movie made up of all the stuff other movies cut out. Pallaoro’s unconventional approach yields unexpected rewards. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted May 26, 2023
      About My Father (2023) I suppose it’s a painless enough way for a beloved actor to pay some bills. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted May 26, 2023
      The Eight Mountains (2022) There’s some excellent filmmaking on display here. There’s also an awful lot of it. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted May 25, 2023
      BlackBerry (2023) Interestingly ambivalent and scabrously funny, it’s an inverted 'Social Network' for also-rans. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted May 17, 2023
      American Graffiti (1973) A wistful picture about the twilight of American innocence, set on the precipice of the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam. It’s the last night of summer, in more ways than one. - Crooked Marquee
      Read More | Posted May 12, 2023
      Raging Bull (1980) One of the great American films, not for what it tells us about LaMotta, but for what it tells us about ourselves. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted May 05, 2023
      Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (2023) Nearly every conversation I’ve had since seeing the film has started with me saying, 'Don’t worry, they didn’t screw it up.' - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Apr 28, 2023
      Judy Blume Forever (2023) What a gift it is to let a child know they are not alone. What a cruel thing to try and take that feeling away by making such stories inaccessible to them. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Apr 28, 2023
      Beau Is Afraid (2023) The movie is mean-spirited, deeply unpleasant and I laughed myself sick. Your mileage may vary. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Apr 28, 2023
      Past Lives (2023) An achingly lovely debut. Song’s touch is deft, delicate and it sure gets a little dusty in the auditorium at the end. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Apr 26, 2023
      Master Gardener (2022) This is Schrader’s least cynical film, earnestly and sometimes clumsily asking if it is indeed possible for the worst among us to be redeemed by love. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Apr 26, 2023
      Evil Dead Rise (2023) Playing this silly material straight one of the most baffling creative decisions in franchise-era filmmaking. It’s like remaking 'Airplane!' as 'Zero Hour.' - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Apr 26, 2023
      Rachel, Rachel (1968) It’s a low-key character study tuned to Woodward’s exquisite performance, one of the decade’s finest. - Crooked Marquee
      Read More | Posted Apr 26, 2023
      Walk Up (2022) A movie to be puzzled over instead of solved, seemingly designed to trip up anybody trying to take things too literally. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Apr 26, 2023
      In Front of Your Face (2021) One of the filmmaker’s finest efforts. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Apr 26, 2023
      Introduction (2021) Builds to a soju-soaked eruption of the filmmaker's usual sozzled table talk that seems too slight a climax for even such a miniature, 66-minute movie. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Apr 26, 2023
      Merrily We Go to Hell (1932) Nothing kills the allure of an open marriage like your wife rolling into the club at one in the morning with Cary Grant. - Crooked Marquee
      Read More | Posted Apr 17, 2023
      Renfield (2023) It has an amusing premise, a killer supporting performance and bafflingly little interest in either. A staggering misallocation of resources. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Apr 17, 2023
      How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022) It’s a fun movie to watch. So much fun, it took until about halfway home for me to begin bristling at how neatly Goldhaber has stacked the deck. The audience remains unchallenged throughout. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Apr 17, 2023
      Showing Up (2022) Funny in such a reserved, bone-dry fashion that half the audience will probably spend the movie wondering what the rest of us are laughing at. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Apr 13, 2023
      Tori and Lokita (2022) One of the Dardennes’ most agonizingly suspenseful films, and also one of their best. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Apr 11, 2023
      Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) A cheaper, chintzier version of this movie might have been as much fun as these actors appear to be having. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Apr 04, 2023
      Spinning Gold (2023) Aside from being incredibly offensive to anybody who cares about this music, the movie is also terrible. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Apr 04, 2023
      The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) In the hands of a great visual stylist (like Rossen himself) the movie could have been a masterpiece. As is, it’s still a corker. - Crooked Marquee
      Read More | Posted Apr 04, 2023
      Air (2023) An underdog sports movie without the sports. And without the underdogs. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Apr 04, 2023
      Yes, Madam (1985) A rather ridiculous film. But in it, you can see a superstar being born. - Crooked Marquee
      Read More | Posted Mar 25, 2023
      John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) The overkill attains a giddy, orgiastic effect. The movie’s massiveness is part of the joke, its sheer scale the stuff of absurdist comedy. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Mar 25, 2023
      Piaffe (2022) A slippery meditation on gender and eroticism that drifts into a wondrous state of abstraction, full of dialogue-free interludes powered by sound, movement and sex scenes in which people aren’t actually having sex. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Mar 25, 2023
      Inside (2023) What’s left is the not inconsiderable pleasure of a fearless performer pushing himself to the brink of madness, but I can name at least a dozen other, better movies in which Dafoe also does that. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Mar 20, 2023
      Moving On (2022) Bouncing back from career nadirs shilling in the bizarre vanity project of an increasingly weird Florida retiree, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin recover nicely in this spiky, sometimes ramshackle comedy. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Mar 20, 2023
      Boston Strangler (2023) One of the most shamelessly pandering pictures I’ve seen in some time. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Mar 16, 2023
      The Boston Strangler (1968) A shockingly hopeless look at institutional incompetence in the face of an unfathomable threat. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Mar 16, 2023
      65 (2023) Do you know why James Cameron never showed us Newt sobbing inconsolably over the dead bodies of her mom and dad? Because he’s an entertainer, not a sadistic moron. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Mar 14, 2023
      Champions (2023) There isn’t a surprise in the movie except for how enjoyable it is. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Mar 09, 2023
      Scream VI (2023) Boasts the funniest fake New York locations since Jackie Chan looked out upon the mountain vistas of 'Rumble in the Bronx.' - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Mar 09, 2023
      Beau travail (1999) The movie is a mass of engorged muscles and entwined limbs; desire rerouted through conformity and cruelty in the rhythm of the night. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Mar 09, 2023
      Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre (2023) Feels like the third or fourth installment of a forgotten franchise, one of those late-series entries where everybody’s happy to see each other again and nobody is going to be accused of over-exerting themselves. This is not a knock. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Mar 05, 2023
      Creed III (2023) Jordan is let down in a big way by cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau, who flattens all these evocative images into a hazy, low-contrast, digital blur. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Mar 02, 2023
      The Quiet Girl (2022) A delicate film of small gestures and the slow building of trust. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Mar 02, 2023
      How to Rob (2022) A familiar story of two stick-up guys from Quincy who knock over the wrong North End bookie, but beneath the Boston crime movie clichés is a surprising lyricism, building to an unexpectedly emotional conclusion. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Mar 02, 2023
      Cocaine Bear (2023) This is slovenly meme s--t designed to be lapped up by insecure audiences desperate to feel like they’re hip and in on the joke, no matter that there isn't one. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Feb 24, 2023
      Emily (2022) O’Connor gins up a randy melodrama of missed connections, undelivered letters and deathbed confessions in the doomy, romantic spirit of her subject. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Feb 23, 2023
      Full Time (2021) It’s a panic attack of a movie about a single mom during a week when ends won’t quite meet, and how sometimes it takes the stamina of a superhero just to get through the goddamn day. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Feb 19, 2023
      Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania (2023) These days, the world’s largest entertainment franchise is capable only of churning out advertisements for itself. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Feb 15, 2023
      Marlowe (2022) On paper this all sounds perfect, yet almost nothing in the picture works. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Feb 14, 2023
      Marnie (1964) A sinister, unpleasant picture, yet you can’t stop thinking about it. When the movie’s over you want to take a shower, and then talk about it some more. - Crooked Marquee
      Read More | Posted Feb 14, 2023
      Magic Mike's Last Dance (2023) Look closer and you’ll see a more serious film about artists in transition, trying to figure out ways forward in the new normals when the old ones aren’t working anymore. - North Shore Movies
      Read More | Posted Feb 14, 2023
      One Fine Morning (2022) There’s a beautiful flow to the picture. I’ve heard it compared to a river, which is one of those things critics say that sounds crazy until you see the movie and then it makes perfect sense. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Feb 09, 2023
      The Eternal Daughter (2022) ‘The Eternal Daughter’ isn’t a horror movie, but it’s haunted. This is a hotel where you bring your own ghosts. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
      Read More | Posted Feb 06, 2023
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