“The perfunctory affair feels more like an outline for a movie than a developed screenplay, full of the kind of placeholder dialogue someone jots down with the idea that they’ll go back and embellish it with something more colorful later. I really miss corny wisecracks in action movies. Also, a little disappointed that Statham’s character isn’t named John Mutiny.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 08/21/2026
“The kind of movie you start watching from somewhere in the middle on late night television and find that it’s imprinted itself on you. There are scenes in God Told Me To so strange that I still can’t believe I saw them, and if you try and describe the final act to a friend they’ll think you’re pulling their leg. Yet the picture proceeds with a forlorn gravity that casts a lingering spell.” – Crooked Marquee, 08/21/2026
“A vehicle for yet another wonderful performance from Willem Dafoe, who plays the sheepish postman like a slowly opening flower. One of our greatest living actors and arguably the most consistent, Dafoe has such range he can play everything from comic book supervillains to Jesus Christ, but he rarely gets to be an ordinary guy the way he does here.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 08/20/2026
“O’Hara made being unreasonable hilarious, and you can see a lot of Moira’s DNA in her big-screen breakthrough performance as Delia Deetz, Winona Ryder’s self-involved stepmother in Beetlejuice. Arkin compares O’Hara’s turn to the Wicked Witch in The Wizard Of Oz, because ‘the entire movie hinges on how over-the-top committed her performance is.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/18/2026
“A raucous, freewheeling folk tale full of sidewinding digressions and narrative cul-de-sacs with secret meanings hiding in plain sight. The film is mostly a character study, something of a revenge drama, half a heist movie, a bit of a musical and all heart. Like the title character, it’s a charmingly verbose and swaggeringly confident American original.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 08/17/2026
“The movie is as loopy and unhinged as its heroine, keeping us on the back foot from an opening car crash set to screeching strings courtesy of the star’s soon-to-be ex-husband David Shire. The Bernard Hermann-esque score makes a menacing introduction for Dianne Cruise, our shape-shifting protagonist traveling up a river of memory.” – Crooked Marquee, 08/14/2026
“Absent the ache of World’s Fair or the devastation of TV Glow, this is a much slighter, sillier picture. Schoenbrun’s humor is an extremely online, meme-friendly absurdism for which your mileage will vary. I complained to a friend afterwards that a lot of the dialogue feels like it was written with the end goal of being all-lowercase quotations in Letterboxd reviews.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/13/2026
A quick chat with my buddy Blake Howard about how delighted we were by director David Robert Mitchell’s lean and mean little dinosaur thriller. Blake suggested someone should start Greystoke-ing Ewan McGregor’s dialogue whenever he’s playing an American, and we both gave thanks for Anne Hathaway’s Streep-level emoting whilst swatting pterodactyls. – One Heat Minute, 08/12/2026
“It pulls off what six Jurassic Park sequels have failed to do, giving us a full-tilt, bracingly nasty dino-attack adventure that feels fresh and exhilarating. There’s a giddy, childlike mean streak to the mayhem recalling Spielberg in his Poltergeist and Temple Of Doom mode. Folks get gobbled up in abrupt and sometimes riotously undignified ways.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 08/12/2026
“A mostly made-up mishmash of coming-of-age cliches so self-aware that an early scene has the protagonist explaining what a bildungsroman is. Matt Johnson and his regular writing partner Matthew Miller shrewdly deploy familiar Hollywood formulas so we can see every set-up and welcome every payoff. They’re cooking up comfort food, and Tony delivers.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/11/2026
SPLICED PERSONALITY 