Boston Hassle

Since 2011, we have been your daily resource dedicated to showcasing the diverse and often overlooked music, art, and film scenes in Greater Boston and the wider New England area. We shine a light on the unique cultures that contribute to these communities, many of which are frequently ignored by mainstream media. Our platform supports a network of writers and citizen journalists who explore and highlight these vital aspects of our city, providing an opportunity for emerging writers to share their voices. Bostonhassle.com is your go-to destination for discovering the most exciting art, events, ideas, and sounds that Boston, Massachusetts has to offer. If you're interested in helping us spotlight the innovative and underrepresented cultures around you, feel free to reach out at [email protected]. Our team at Bostonhassle.com consists of musicians, artists, writers, and passionate individuals from the Greater Boston Area. We curate and update a daily list of music, art, and film events happening in Boston, throughout New England, and beyond.

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REVIEW: Dangerous Animals (2025) dir. Sean Byrne

3 weeks ago | bostonhassle.com | Dangerous Animals |Alexis den Boggende

Since the 1975 release of Steven Spielberg’s beloved blockbuster Jaws, a slew of filmmakers have attempted to capture the same terror. From 1999’s Deep Blue Sea to 2016’s The Shallows, all these films have failed to conjure half the heart and atmosphere Jaws has, suffering from poor acting, writing, or the blatant overuse of CGI (or all three).
REVIEW: Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025) dir. Matt Palmer

1 month ago | bostonhassle.com | Alexis den Boggende

The Fear Street trilogy (1994, 1978, 1666), based off the works of beloved young adult horror author R.L. Stine, was a critical success on Netflix in 2021. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street movies offered horror fans an escapist nightmare brimming with blood, guts, camp, a strong storyline, and brutal kills (I am frequently haunted by the bread slicer scene). These films felt like a triple horror feature you’d see at a drive-in on a hazy summer night.
BUFF 25 DISPATCH, PART TWO: Shorts, Betrothals, and Lycanthropes

2 months ago | bostonhassle.com | Oscar Goff |Alexis den Boggende |Kyle Amato

The 2025 Boston Underground Film Festival ran from Wednesday, 3/19 through Sunday, 3/23 at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, and the Hassle’s intrepid writers Oscar Goff, Alexis den Boggende, and Kyle Amato were on the scene. Click here to catch up with the Hassle’s first dispatch from BUFF, and watch this space for our team’s continuing coverage!THE DUNWICH HORRORS dir.
GO TO: Burden of Dreams (1982) dir. Les Blank

Aug 8, 2024 | bostonhassle.com | Oscar Goff

Werner Herzog’s 1982 epic Fitzcarraldo is, by any metric, a landmark of world cinema. Its story– about an eccentric dreamer’s quixotic quest to pull a steamship over a mountain in the Amazon rainforest and build an opera house in the jungle– remains one of the movies’ most potent metaphors for the frustrations and triumphs of artistic passion.
REVIEW: Kneecap (2024) dir. Rich Peppiatt

Aug 1, 2024 | bostonhassle.com | Oscar Goff

Kneecap, the exuberant, mostly-true romp which opens at the Coolidge and the Somerville this weekend, in some ways feels like a corrective to Back to Black, the dreadful Amy Winehouse biopic released earlier this year. Both films are superficially similar, telling as they do the stories of 21st-century musicians who rose to notoriety from working-class backgrounds in the British Isles (Winehouse in suburban London in the early 2000s, Kneecap in West Belfast in the late 2010s).
INTERVIEW: Director Greg Kwedar on ‘SING SING’

Jul 30, 2024 | bostonhassle.com | Oscar Goff

The story behind Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing, which opens this Friday at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, is nearly as inspiring as that of the film itself. The great Colman Domingo plays John “Divine G” Whitfield, a soulful writer and actor incarcerated in the titular prison who finds artistic release and community in a robust and vibrant theater program.
REVIEW: Humane (2024) dir. Caitlin Cronenberg

Jul 25, 2024 | bostonhassle.com | Alexis den Boggende

Dystopian flicks are beginning to feel a little too close to reality—and that’s exactly how Caitlin Cronenberg’s Humane feels. The film opens with depressing and overwhelming sound bites that feel a little too close to what we hear on CNN—snippets of various television networks spewing nothing but bad news. Humanity is facing a horrific environmental crisis, and governments worldwide are enforcing voluntary, humane euthanasia upon society to lower the population by 20%.
REVIEW: Longlegs (2024) dir. Osgood Perkins

Jul 11, 2024 | bostonhassle.com | Oscar Goff

Longlegs, the new horror film by Osgood Perkins, is haunted by all the things you’d expect it to be– trauma, the Devil, Nicolas Cage’s latter-day acting career– but it’s haunted by something stranger as well: the earthy, ethereal glam-rock sounds of T. Rex.
REVIEW: The Vourdalak (2023) dir. Adrien Beau

Jul 10, 2024 | bostonhassle.com | Oscar Goff

As computer-generated special effects have grown more and more seamless, I have become increasingly convinced that realism is only half the point. Now that CGI can create any spectacle a filmmaker can conceive, it’s harder to gin up that childlike sense of wonder; if you’ve seen one exploding planet, you’ve seen them all. On the flipside, consider the stop-motion creations of Ray Harryhausen, or the grisly homemade effects of the original Evil Dead.
REVIEW: MaXXXine (2024) dir. Ti West

Jul 4, 2024 | bostonhassle.com | Oscar Goff

The story of X and Pearl, the twin 2022 hits from director Ti West, has already become enshrined in horror fan lore. While sequestered in quarantine before shooting the first film in early 2021, West and star Mia Goth conceived and wrote the second, and convinced studio A24 to extend the production to shoot two films for the price of one. The existence of Pearl was kept entirely under wraps, and was only announced via a surprise trailer at the end of X’s credits.