“Blue Heron is about how we can spend our entire lives trying to understand what happened to us when we were children. It’s also about summer, about the smell of freshly cut grass and lazy days by the seaside. Romvari conjures that gorgeously directionless feeling of when you’re a little kid and afternoon idylls seem to stretch out in front of you into infinity.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/07/2026

“Unlike other kids’ films that spend their running times frantically gesticulating for your attention, The Sheep Detectives has a low-key, easygoing sense of humor, like an old English countryside comedy that just so happens to feature talking lambs. Then it sneaks up on you with some unexpectedly heavy ideas about loss and the importance of bearing witness.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 05/06/2026

“Serkis has spent the past 15 years trying to bring Animal Farm to the screen, and it’s surprsing that in all that time he apparently never got around to reading the book. Rogen charmlessly bellows his way through the usual gauntlet of poop jokes, innuendos, pop culture references and rib-nudging needle-drops that make children’s cartoons such a chore.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 05/06/2026

“This amusingly brutal sharksploitation cheapie from director Renny Harlin follows stodgy 1970s disaster movie formulas to such a T that the characters crack jokes about The Poseidon Adventure. But it’s got some spirited work from Harlin, who takes delight in devising some truly ghoulish exits for these poor passengers. You can’t help but laugh.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 05/01/2026

“Amid the feel-good, gang’s-all-here trappings, the film flirts with provocative ideas about a culture in decline, where seemingly every institution is being gutted for the sake of the bottom line and the masses are willing to accept ‘good enough’ over excellence. Which is slightly ironic, because ‘good enough’ is an apt description of The Devil Wears Prada 2.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/29/2026

“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, 04/27/2026

“It begins as a highly theatrical, frankly captivating pas de deux in a barn-like studio space where these two extraordinary actresses encircle each other and drop insinuations, wandering in and out of their own flashbacks with astonishing fluidity. Lowery uses stage lighting tricks and flyaway walls so that the past and present are living under the same roof.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 04/24/2026

“An enchantingly raggedy love story about two horny teen witches with a psychic connection and a hunky boy with a very bad tattoo. The movie borrows the language of late ’90s and early 2000s paranormal YA adventures. It’s the same spooky kids’ stuff that made Jane Schoenbrun see the TV glow, only with higher stakes and better sex.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 04/22/2026

“Most movies about musicians follow an artist’s rise, fall and eventual redemption. Partially funded by the Jackson estate, Michael is all rise — the ascension of a holy being to the top of the universe. The movie ends in 1988 with the singer’s triumphant solo Bad tour, which is kind of like ending an O.J. Simpson biopic with him winning the Heisman Trophy.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/21/2026

“The existential disconnection of The Stranger is a product of Camus’ flat, affectless prose. So how does one convey this on film? I’m not sure it’s possible. Ozon shoots in a chilly, digital monochrome devoid of emphatic camera movements. The movie is distant and aloof, which is true to the spirit of the material, if something of a drag to actually sit through.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 04/19/2026