Welcome to Boston. A dystopian place where drug dealers execute foreign tourists, bands of thugs kidnap and rape young women, the most powerful man in town is a city councilor beholden to organized crime, most of the cops are crooked, and the police chief is a feckless old man who might do the right thing... Continue Reading →
A fantastic film that won five Oscars--including Elizabeth Taylor as Best Actress and Sandy Dennis as Best Supporting Actress--any synopsis of mine will be wanting, so I'll just give it the most cursory of efforts. There is some good Massachusetts stuff, though, as the movie was filmed at Smith College in Northampton and surrounding towns.... Continue Reading →
A young man named Van (Norman Reedus of The Walking Dead fame) is stuck in a dead-end life while his friends are at college because he has to stay behind to take of his alcoholic paraplegic father (Will Lyman of PBS Frontline fame). Their year-round lakeside cabin is across the water from the house he... Continue Reading →
Mystery Street, while not the first movie filmed and set in Massachusetts, might be the first real "Boston movie." Ricardo Montalban plays Peter Moralas, a young Barnstable County detective whose first murder investigation takes him to Boston after a skeleton is found among the dunes of Cape Cod. With nothing but a box of bones... Continue Reading →
It's Christmas Eve in Amherst. Amherst native John Sparrow (Lloyd Bridges) returns to town to visit his wife, who has been institutionalized for the past five years. Affluent Californian Katherine Johnson (Shirley Jones) comes to town to send her son from boarding school to London for the holidays to be with his father (her husband)... Continue Reading →
A band of writers for an alternate Boston newspaper struggle to keep the paper afloat amid rumors that the paper will be sold to a big publisher. Harry Lucas (John Heard) has been the Back Bay Mainline's top writer since it's inception an the late '60s. Abbie (Lindsay Crouse) is both Harry's girlfriend and the... Continue Reading →
At some point late last century, the themes of Boston films started to change. Stuffy blue bloods and university types began to give way to gritty blue-collar Irishmen. Karl Malden stars as crusty old iron worker Jack Galvin, who just wants his son Billy (Lenny von Dohlen) to have a better life than he had.... Continue Reading →
A forty-something college professor (Anthony Hopkins) admits to his wife (Shirley MacLane) that he is having an affair with one of his students (Bo Derek). So what does the jilted wife do while the professor and his charge weekend in Montreal? She has a fling with the transient handyman (Michael Brandon) who stops by to... Continue Reading →
A fifty-something housewife (Maureen O'Sullivan) surprises the family by announcing she's pregnant! Husband Harry (Paul Ford) can't see himself being a dad again and their daughter (Connie Stevens) gets jealous and tries with her husband to get pregnant too. Oh, the hi-jinx! Never Too Late was shot primarily in Concord, with the historic town standing... Continue Reading →
A Boston cop (George Nader) befriends a neighborhood hooligan (Tony Curtis) who can't stay out of trouble, no matter how much the cop tries to help him. When $2.5 million goes missing from an armored car firm across the street from Curtis's garage, Nader thinks he knows where to find the thieves. Six Bridges to... Continue Reading →
Mass Flicks 