“With his pockmarks, unibrow and sleazy little moustache, Timée seems to be actively trolling his teen idol persona, playing a fast-talking hustler who’s all guts and gumption, arrogantly convinced of his own greatness and almost entirely devoid of redeeming qualities. It’s the most appealing he’s ever been onscreen. I get the Chalamet thing now.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 12/23/2025
“Few actresses can light up the screen like Kate Hudson, which is easy to forget because she’s usually starring in garbage. She’s incandescent in Song Sung Blue, rocking mom jeans and a Midwestern accent, beaming beatifically through their duets. The movie soars on those songs, and they compensate for a couple of curious storytelling choices.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 12/23/2025
“Chaplin brings an unhinged physicality and unprecedented erotic heat to the previously chaste planet of Pandora. We’ve never seen anything in these pictures like what she’s doing here. For the first half of Fire And Ash, I was asking myself, ‘Do I finally like an Avatar movie?’ and perhaps more pressingly, ‘Am I getting turned on by a giant turquoise lady?’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 12/19/2025
“Redford spends a not inconsiderable amount of All The President’s Men on the phone, silently reacting to an offscreen voice, a big ask for any performer and not the easiest thing to make compelling on camera. But he was always so great at that kind of acting. Redford projected such an easy intelligence that you loved to watch him thinking things through.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 12/16/2025
“Cruise was at the height of his movie star powers, yet we’ve never seen him as diminished as he is in Eyes Wide Shut. He’s never looked so short or ill at ease, with Kubrick’s endless re-takes deliberately sanding all the natural charm off his line readings. Kidman towers over him not just physically, but also transforms into an abruptly unattainable object of mystery.” – Crooked Marquee, 12/12/2025
“Nobody in this movie seems to be reacting to what the other person is saying, and the things they say do not correspond with their behavior. Some of these conversations are so strange they border on outsider art. I’ve seen more than one person claim that while watching Ella McCay they worried there might be a gas leak in the theater. The whole film feels concussed.” – North Shore Movies, 12/12/2025
“My favorite film of 2025 is a funny, melancholy marvel of emotionally constipated New England masculinity, full of characters who can only communicate by busting each other’s chops. One of them asks, ‘Is there anything more beautiful than the sun setting on a fat man stealing second base?’ Nothing I saw this year came close.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 12/11/2025
“Mystery Train is playful that way, using the overlapping incidents in the three stories not to make one of those grandiose ‘everyone is connected’ statements that became an easy way to get invited to the Oscars in the early 2000s, but rather to reflect how differently we all experience the same things. In other words, some people prefer Carl Perkins.” – Crooked Marquee, 12/05/2025
“In whatever form you may find it, Kill Bill remains perhaps the purest distillation of its auteur’s fetishes and fixations, mixing and matching spaghetti westerns, samurai sagas, blaxploitation, kung fu epics and grindhouse rape-revenge pictures into a lavishly produced, cinematically sophisticated smorgasbord of low culture and high style.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 12/04/2025
SPLICED PERSONALITY 