Had a slightly tipsy 2AM Mountain time chat with host Blake Howard about some highlights from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, including Eliza Hittman’s extraordinary Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Josephine Decker’s Shirley, Kirsten Johnson’s Dick Johnson Is Dead and the regrettable fiasco of Dee Rees’ The Last Thing He Wanted. – The Take Podcast 01/31/2020
“Partially a product relaunch, this surprisingly sturdy documentary is itself a savvy business maneuver, positioning one of the biggest stars in the world as a comeback-hungry underdog while introducing us to a new Taylor 2.0 who cusses, disobeys her advisors and is unafraid to speak out about politics, women’s issues and anything else she damn well pleases.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/30/2020
“It’s difficult to imagine a more spectacularly depressing lineup of films. The nominees, which are of substantially higher quality (if not higher spirits) than in recent years, cover such crowd-pleasing topics as cancer, kidnapping, child rape, abortion, Alzheimer’s and animal abuse. I watched them all in a row and needed to go lie down for a little while.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/29/2020
“There’s something so deliciously rotten about Cats it makes you want to share the experience with others. ‘You know, the thing everyone forgets in this age of Netflix is that movies make temporary little communities of a few hundred people at a time,’ Judge enthuses. ‘And this strange little community is truly reveling in the cultural atrocity of Cats.’” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/23/2019
“It’s a bustling ecosystem of hustlers and hoods, all working at shared interests and cross purposes with the density — if not the detail — you’d find in a Richard Price novel or a David Simon television series. Ly isn’t afraid to wear his influences on his sleeve, with elements of Training Day and La Haine bumping up against memories of Clockers and The Wire.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/16/2020
“These are vexing, sometimes infuriating affairs, probably best suited to viewers who always fall hardest for the ones who don’t love you back. Spending a few days immersed in Schanelec’s work I came to find myself enthralled by her abject indifference to audience expectations, up for the challenge of films designed to remain teasingly out of reach.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/15/2020
“The secret weapon here of course is Stewart. Wearing a bleach-blonde buzz-cut and a bomber jacket over a sports bra, the former Twilight teen turned international art cinema icon shows no signs of slumming as she applies her trademark inverted-Brando millennial murmurings to the screenplay’s stock scenarios. I loved watching her in this.” – North Shore Movies, 01/10/2019
“The Thing eventually found an audience on cable, where I know I wasn’t alone in watching it late at night when I was far too young to be doing so. The sheer nastiness of it all had an imprinting effect on a generation of budding cinema buffs. It’s one of the first films I can recall seeing that felt like it was trying to hurt you. The movie’s really, really mean.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/09/2020
“A visually monotonous experience. It’s cinema as a VR headset, where all the expressive qualities of the art — images staged to convey ideas and juxtaposed for thematic emphasis — have been replaced by a dull literal-mindedness, a quote-unquote immersive trip into unconvincing verisimilitude that makes a lousy substitute for drama.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/08/2020
“This is one swarthy, full-throated, four-hanky tear-jerker. Set in 1950s Rio de Janeiro, it’s a tale of two sisters torn asunder by the bullheaded men in their lives. It’s a bold, brassy film of hyper-saturated colors and oversized emotions, thrusting the camera so close to the characters’ faces you can count the beads of sweat on their brows.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/03/2020
SPLICED PERSONALITY 