“Altman’s so-called heresy was actually a logical extension of Chandler’s vision of Marlowe as the last hurrah for chivalry in a fallen, postwar world that’s moved beyond moral concerns. Gould is grubby but gallant, a decent guy surrounded by sharks and betrayed for having faith in his fellow man. His best friend describes him as a born loser. He even loses his cat.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/29/2022
“’It’s easy in our lives to see the people we meet as characters. Even in your own friend group, you know? He’s the drunk. She’s the party girl. He’s the one who gives me advice.’ Vengeance is about a man coming to realize that the people around him are actually much more complicated than the characters he’s assigned them to play on his podcast.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/27/2022
”This storybook romance was messy from the start. People got hurt. The Last Movie Stars doesn’t skimp on the unsavory details – the fighting, philandering and drinking – but doesn’t dwell on them, either. One comes away with a sense of two difficult people who loved each other so much they eventually found a way to work it out, but it wasn’t easy.” – North Shore Movies, 07/27/2022
“The irony is not lost on our star-crossed couple that the primary ethnic rivalry is between Indians who have never been to India and African Americans who have never been to Africa. Family traditions are seen as both a blessing and a curse, providing much-needed support to minorities in an unwelcoming country while also keeping them walled off from each other.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/22/2022
“A throwback to funny Friday night fright flicks like Tremors or Signs, Peele’s latest is an audience picture full of good, old-fashioned jump scares and blessed with an economy of scale. How refreshing to see a summer sci-fi blockbuster in which the fate of the world doesn’t hang in the balance. It’s just a few colorful characters trying to not get eaten by a monster.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/20/2022
“Lancaster was never more moving onscreen than when he was lying to himself, and there are shades of his shattering performance as John Cheever’s The Swimmer in Lou’s tall tales of his glory days. ‘You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean back then,’ he rhapsodizes, hilariously, as if even the sea were somehow now diminished like everything else.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/15/2022
“The feature debut of Homecoming showrunner Eli Horowitz wants to be a horror movie about the desperate lengths to which people will go to avoid aging in a culture only interested in youth. That the film features a 50-year-old lead who doesn’t look a day over 35 is either egregious miscasting or a level of irony too sophisticated for this reviewer to grasp.” – North Shore Movies, 07/15/2022
“No living director so evocatively photographs a tangle of limbs, or is as adept at capturing the electric charge of two people sharing a small physical space. Like most Claire Denis films, Both Sides Of The Blade is about the battles between our bodies and our minds, wherein our unexplainable longings beat out logic and what’s good for us every time.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/14/2022
“There’s no frame around the proceedings, nor any character introductions for the sake of the audience. We’re thrown into the action via a herky-jerky, 16mm handheld camera bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter around the performers in black-and-white, following their rapid mood swings from back-slapping bonhomie to chillingly sudden spurts of hostility.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/01/2022
“The movie mashes up a whole stew of ‘90s action tropes and rips entire pages out of the screenplay for Speed. But since this is another affair from producer Randall Emmett’s cash-strapped crap factory, we can assume most of the film’s funding was divvied up amongst the twenty-eight credited producers as not a lot of dollar value has actually made it onscreen.” – North Shore Movies, 07/01/2022
SPLICED PERSONALITY 