“Absolutely terrible, but maybe also kind of great? There’s a mulish integrity to Her Private Hell. Can you call something a failure when it succeeds in being exactly the movie the director wanted to make? The logical endpoint of Refn’s whole deal, like he’s reached his final form. I’m morbidly fascinated to see where he could possibly take things from here.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 07/24/2026
“Neill was not a needy performer, and appeared perfectly content to let the women in his pictures take center stage. You can trace this tendency all the way back to one of his very first films. In Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 My Brilliant Career, Neill plays a strikingly handsome, lovelorn son of privilege who is bowled over by Judy Davis’ headstrong Sybylla Melvyn.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/24/2026
“A fantastic fusion of form and content. It is incredibly embarrassing for a man to call himself The Lizard King, and it’s also pretty awesome. The overwrought grandiloquence of the music is why it totally rules, and, in keeping with his career-long aversion to understatement, Stone creates a beat-for-beat visual corollary. The movie feels like a Doors song.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/22/2026
“Like a lot of great poets, Mary Oliver made what she did look easy. Try it. It’s not. Waters’ engaging documentary strips the artist of that annoying aura of Oprah-fication, burrowing beyond the gaseous platitudes into concrete examinations of her poems that demonstrate how Oliver’s writing is more complex than its reputation might lead one to believe.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 07/20/2026
Always a pleasure talking to my buddy Blake Howard, this time about how Christopher Nolan’s latest opus has raised the bar for summer blockbusters, first in terms of practical location filmmaking and the benefits of doing things the hard way, but also as a reminder that entertainment and ideas need not be mutually exclusive. It’s a thrillingly complicated picture. – One Heat Minute, 07/18/2026
Had a great time talking with investigative reporter and mystery novelist Hank Phillipi Ryan after WBUR CitySpace’s Set In Boston screening of the original 1968 Thomas Crown Affair. Hank picks apart the many plot holes while I’m perfectly content to watch movie stars being movie stars in fabulous outfits. She’s not a big McQueen fan, which gets pretty funny. – WBUR CitySpace, 07/17/2026
“Thematically, it’s a continuation of Oppenheimer, Nolan’s masterpiece in which a brilliant American Prometheus stole the power of the gods and doomed the world while trying to save it. Odysseus has likewise broken a sacred covenant for what he thinks is the greater good, unleashing unforeseen consequences that will reverberate through the ages.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/15/2026
“You can see a clear generational divide in the reception to these films, with most of us old fogeys mystified by the idea of an Evil Dead movie that doesn’t have Bruce Campbell shrieking and making Three Stooges noises while being punched repeatedly in the face. Taking all the kidding out of films that are essentially send-ups is certainly a choice.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 07/12/2026
“The troupe’s trademark blend of anti-comedy non sequiturs feels even more random than usual in this slapdash outing, replete with unfunny, starfucky cameos. Garishly overlit with a distracting reliance on fake bluescreen backgrounds, it’s the first theatrically released motion picture I’ve seen that could pass for a cellular telephone commercial.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 07/10/2026
“The set of self-imposed limitations creates its own aesthetic. Jenkin’s hand-cranked camera won’t run for more than 28 seconds at a time, forcing him to tell the story in a series of punchy, discrete images. Our brains assemble the scenes almost like a mental jigsaw puzzle. It’s amazing how many gaps your mind fills in for you when prompted properly.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/09/2026
SPLICED PERSONALITY 