Jumped on a call with my buddy Blake Howard after he was blown away by our favorite film of the year so far. We both rave about Matthew McConaughey’s miracle of a performance in writer-director Andrew Patterson’s richly idiosyncratic and often indecribable folk tale The Rivals Of Amziah King, a movie full of life in all it’s messy sadness, musicality and joy. – One Heat Minute, 08/26/2026
“Kaufman has never specified why he chose Malkovich, but the reasoning to me seems self-evident. Is there any other famous movie star who you would believe had a portal leading to the inside of their head? Maybe Christopher Walken, but his name isn’t nearly as much fun to say aloud. People say ‘John Malkovich’ an awful lot in this movie.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/26/2026
“The endless road is less of a plot device and more of an existential condition, and the film is at its weakest during the obligatory monsters-in-the-woods scare sequences that presumably got it financed in the first place. The second half is much stronger than the first, after it stops trying to be a horror movie and becomes more of a philosophical argument.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 08/26/2026
The news that Obsession star Inde Navarrette turned down a role in Heat 2 to play one of Marvel’s rebooted X-Men sent the internet into a tizzy last weekend. Pope of Mann Blake Howard called an emergency conclave with myself and fellow One Heat Minute regular Roxana Hadadi to rant about some of the stupider reactions we’ve been reading. – One Heat Minute, 08/24/2026
“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
SPLICED PERSONALITY 