“Yet for a knockabout comedy contrived as a way to make boat payments and get drunk on the beach, Donovan’s Reef is nonetheless fascinating on several fronts, not the least of which is its fantasy of benevolent colonialism in a tropical Valhalla. The island is a utopia lorded over by aging white warriors. Lucky for us their hearts are in the right place.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/20/2026
“Kubrick was fascinated by the ways in which we foolish mortals try to impose order on an indifferent universe, constructing elaborate systems and machinery that inevitably come crashing down around us. His dark sense of humor and the pitiless temperament of his films caused some to label him a misanthropist, though I’d say he qualifies more as a realist.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/19/2026
“Some actors vamp better than others. Margaret Qualley happens to be great at it, sashaying through the picture as a one-note femme fatale. She’s laying it on too thick, but you’re happy to see someone doing something. The only time Ford’s camera comes to life is when he’s trying to fit her seemingly endless legs into the widescreen frame.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/19/2026
“The film takes place in a nebulous emotional space after an amicable divorce, when a family is still figuring out how they’re going to move forward. Anna works with tapestries upon which she presses pieces of iron, making patterns out of the impressions they leave behind. That’s sort of what the movie is about: the faded residue of a relationship that’s over.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/18/2026
“You don’t get the sense that anything is being prioritized in a Gore Verbinski film, there’s just stuff everywhere. I wasn’t surprised to learn this script was originally written as anthology film, then retrofitted into a feature. None of the flashbacks pay off. It’s like binge-watching a whole season of Black Mirror in the middle of a movie.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/15/2026
“A collection of warmed over cops-and-robbers cliches that were already pretty hoary when Michael Mann threaded them together three decades ago in Heat, absent the doomy grandeur that elevates Mann’s routine policer material into poetry. Plodding and workmanlike, Crime 101 is as prosaic a picture as I’ve seen in ages.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/12/2026
“I think, particularly when you’re dealing with kink, if you’re treating the kink in an oblique way, or you’re panning away from it or whatever, then it feels like you as a filmmaker are casting judgement on it as something that deserves to be offscreen. Like it’s too scandalous for the screen. So I said, ‘We need to be able to see how these guys are fucking.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/12/2026
“Maybe the best way to describe Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is that it feels like a movie made by a 14-year-old. I mean this as a compliment. This is a dreamy and occasionally foolish film made with the heedless ardor of first love, a movie of frightening, sticky desires and irrational anger. It’s also the kind of thing that makes literary purists want to pull their hair out.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/11/2026
“I’ll cop to giggling in appreciation more than once at the threadbare exuberance of Luc Besson’s often risible craptacular, which has been thrown together with no particular interest in Bram Stoker’s oft-told story, but a mad love of making images. Especially silly ones. It’s Besson’s attempt to do cinema du look on a discount budget. Let’s just say the seams show.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/08/2026
“The thing about pop crazes is that they’re ephemeral. But the entertainment industry is designed to drag them out until there’s no more money or audience goodwill left to be plundered. The Moment is aptly titled because such things are fleeting, and we’re watching an artist try to figure out in real time how much of herself should be for sale.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/06/2026
SPLICED PERSONALITY 