“In a cleverly counterintuitive choice, the directors keep the camera locked down at a considerable distance from the performers. Any other movie would shove the zaniness in our faces with wacky music and close-ups, but these antics are wryly, amusingly entombed within a still screen full of dead air and empty space. Gargantuan egos have seldom seemed so small.” – North Shore Movies, 06/24/2022
“It’s a movie about a myth, one in which Elvis represents a dream of liberation — musical, sexual, racial — and how that dream was corrupted and commodified by carny-barker capitalists sociopathically sucking every last dollar dry, leaving the singer a druggy, bloated parody of his former promise, catatonic in front of the television. It’s the story of America.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/23/2022
“Abstracting the crimes and potential punishments shifts the threat from a national issue to something more existential, while Panahi’s emphasis on the quotidian, comedic hassles of a family vacation with which we can all identify makes these extraordinary circumstances universal. You realize this could happen to people like us because these people are us.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/22/2022
“It’s the first non-musical directed by Garland’s then-beau and future husband Vincente Minnelli, who coordinates the teeming Times Square and bustling subway stations like choruses. His camera captures such a pulsating sense of big city life the film is commonly mistaken as being filmed on location, when in actuality it was all shot on the MGM lot.“ – Crooked Marquee, 06/17/2022
“A tawdry, ten-hour miniseries about the making of The Godfather that’s so hilariously full of shit I can’t take my eyes off it. Normally I like to say there should be no such things as guilty pleasures, and if any work of art brings you enjoyment in this cold, rotten world you’ve got no reason to be ashamed of that. But we’ll make an exception for The Offer.” – North Shore Movies, 06/16/2022
“Refreshingly irreverent, boasting a more eccentric cast of characters than you’re used to seeing in nature adventure documentaries. That’s probably because you’ve got to be at least a little bit crazy to want to compete in the event in the first place. First prize is ten thousand dollars cash, nailed to a tree at the finish line. Second prize is a set of steak knives.” – North Shore Movies, 06/14/2022
“It’s 51 minutes into Something Wild when Ray Liotta makes his entrance and knocks the entire film off its axis. This genial, sexy comedy has suddenly become incredibly scary, and the following hour’s nerve-racking, seasick sensations are almost entirely attributable to this up-and-coming young actor with the too-loud laugh and terrifying eyes.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/14/2022
“Trevorrow’s inexplicably popular 2015 Jurassic World proceeded from the notion that jaded theme park audiences had grown bored with these majestic creatures, so it makes a sad sort of sense that the filmmakers would eventually as well. Jurassic World Dominion is a dinosaur movie with no particular interest in dinosaurs. The animals serve mainly as nuisances.” – North Shore Movies, 06/10/2022
“One of the filmmaker’s more pitiless efforts, it’s a brutal examination of transactional relationships that feels eerily prophetic today, as if he’d already seen the dire ends to which the 1980s would bring us. Most of the movie takes place in malls, hotels and other commercial settings, split into three chapters following three characters at various stages of selling out.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/10/2022
“He kept a cartoonist’s sensibility in his appreciation for exaggerated lines and curves, and as the later films grew more explicitly artificial, they came to look more and more like his drawings come to life. Fellini was fond of blaring music while shooting scenes, which is why characters always appear to be slightly swaying to the wistful waltzes of Nino Rota’s scores.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/09/2022
SPLICED PERSONALITY 