Sean Burns
Tomatometer-approved critic
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.
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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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
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| Posted May 26, 2023
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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
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| Posted May 26, 2023
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About My Father (2023) |
I suppose it’s a painless enough way for a beloved actor to pay some bills. - North Shore Movies
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| Posted May 26, 2023
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The Eight Mountains (2022) |
There’s some excellent filmmaking on display here. There’s also an awful lot of it. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
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| Posted May 25, 2023
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BlackBerry (2023) |
Interestingly ambivalent and scabrously funny, it’s an inverted 'Social Network' for also-rans. - North Shore Movies
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| Posted May 17, 2023
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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
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| Posted May 12, 2023
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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
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| Posted May 05, 2023
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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
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| Posted Apr 28, 2023
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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
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| Posted Apr 28, 2023
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Beau Is Afraid (2023) |
The movie is mean-spirited, deeply unpleasant and I laughed myself sick. Your mileage may vary. - North Shore Movies
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| Posted Apr 28, 2023
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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
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| Posted Apr 26, 2023
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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
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| Posted Apr 26, 2023
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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
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| Posted Apr 26, 2023
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Rachel, Rachel (1968) |
It’s a low-key character study tuned to Woodward’s exquisite performance, one of the decade’s finest. - Crooked Marquee
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| Posted Apr 26, 2023
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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
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| Posted Apr 26, 2023
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In Front of Your Face (2021) |
One of the filmmaker’s finest efforts. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
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| Posted Apr 26, 2023
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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
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| Posted Apr 26, 2023
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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
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| Posted Apr 17, 2023
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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
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| Posted Apr 17, 2023
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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
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| Posted Apr 17, 2023
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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
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| Posted Apr 13, 2023
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Tori and Lokita (2022) |
One of the Dardennes’ most agonizingly suspenseful films, and also one of their best. - North Shore Movies
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| Posted Apr 11, 2023
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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
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| Posted Apr 04, 2023
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Spinning Gold (2023) |
Aside from being incredibly offensive to anybody who cares about this music, the movie is also terrible. - North Shore Movies
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| Posted Apr 04, 2023
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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
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| Posted Apr 04, 2023
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Air (2023) |
An underdog sports movie without the sports. And without the underdogs. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
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| Posted Apr 04, 2023
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Yes, Madam (1985) |
A rather ridiculous film. But in it, you can see a superstar being born. - Crooked Marquee
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| Posted Mar 25, 2023
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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
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| Posted Mar 25, 2023
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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
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| Posted Mar 25, 2023
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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
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| Posted Mar 20, 2023
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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
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| Posted Mar 20, 2023
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Boston Strangler (2023) |
One of the most shamelessly pandering pictures I’ve seen in some time. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
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| Posted Mar 16, 2023
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The Boston Strangler (1968) |
A shockingly hopeless look at institutional incompetence in the face of an unfathomable threat. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
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| Posted Mar 16, 2023
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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
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| Posted Mar 14, 2023
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Champions (2023) |
There isn’t a surprise in the movie except for how enjoyable it is. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
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| Posted Mar 09, 2023
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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
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| Posted Mar 09, 2023
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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
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| Posted Mar 09, 2023
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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
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| Posted Mar 05, 2023
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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
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| Posted Mar 02, 2023
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The Quiet Girl (2022) |
A delicate film of small gestures and the slow building of trust. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
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| Posted Mar 02, 2023
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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
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| Posted Mar 02, 2023
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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
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| Posted Feb 24, 2023
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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
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| Posted Feb 23, 2023
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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
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| Posted Feb 19, 2023
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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
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| Posted Feb 15, 2023
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Marlowe (2022) |
On paper this all sounds perfect, yet almost nothing in the picture works. - WBUR’s Arts & Culture
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| Posted Feb 14, 2023
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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
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| Posted Feb 14, 2023
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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
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| Posted Feb 14, 2023
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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
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| Posted Feb 09, 2023
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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
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| Posted Feb 06, 2023
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