“Robert hangs out all day in a comic book shop where everyone’s trying to out-snob each other, bolstering their street cred with assorted esoterica that nobody could possibly care about beyond these walls. While I came of age in video and record stores instead of comic shops, the film still prompted chills of recognition from this particular critic.” – North Shore Movies, 08/26/2022
“Bardem’s Blanco cuts costs by cruelly laying off longtime employees, covers for cronies who can’t do their jobs properly, uses the company’s internship program as a dating pool and generally embodies every awful trait of the avaricious and overcompensated executives who make our world a more miserable place. You also can’t help but kinda like him.” – North Shore Movies, 08/26/2022
“George Miller’s cerebral fantasia is the kind of oddball, beguilingly personal project an artist makes after a smashing success like Fury Road, cashing in $60 million worth of goodwill on his obsessions and personal peccadilloes. It’s a deeply weird flight of fancy, alternating heady discussions with the most miraculous images you’ll see all year.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/24/2022
“Here we go again with the grief. I feel like I just wrote this review a week ago for Fall but it bears repeating that not every survival movie needs to be a therapy session. When they inevitably remake Jaws in a few years it’s gonna be all about Brody coming to terms with some tragic nautical trauma in his past instead of just killing the shark because it eats people.” – North Shore Movies, 08/22/2022
“With a lush Pino Donaggio score referencing a whole history of sultry Italian thrillers, I think maybe the movie is trying to undercut erotic intrigue with chain restaurant banality. There’s so much dead air and aimless standing around I just assumed the project was an improvisational exercise, and was later aghast to learn that an actual screenplay had been written.” – North Shore Movies, 08/22/2022
“Looser and less self-important than it sounds in synopsis, Buck And The Preacher wears its historical import lightly, with an easy humor that confounded more than a few critics. By this point in his career, the Oscar-winning Poitier’s name had become synonymous with a certain sort of prestige picture starchier than this. It’s a film of simple, sturdy pleasures.” – Crooked Marquee, 08/19/2022
“But sometimes folks go to the movies just because we like to watch people fall in love, and the scorching chemistry between Swayze and Grey (who by all accounts didn’t care for each other’s company off-camera) is enough to crush petty plot concerns or any questions about how they could be dancing to instruments that haven’t been invented yet.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/18/2022
Honored to be invited by my buddy Blake Howard to remember the late, great James Caan’s iconic performance in Michael Mann’s Thief, chatting in the incredible company of Jim Belushi, Jen Johans, Alexi Toliopoulos, S.A. Cosby, Travis Woods, Jordan Harper, Jedidiah Ayres, William Boyle, Bilge Ebiri, Walter Chaw and Scott Derrickson. – One Heat Minute, 08/17/2022
“E.T. is one of the purest and most emotionally direct of all American movies, with not a whit of adult condescension nor any self-protecting irony. Spielberg’s brilliantly subjective camerawork forces even the most jaded and cynical viewers back into the perspective of a child, which might be why it hits grown-ups so much harder than kids.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/11/2022
“I suppose one could argue that Sara DeLappe’s tart, cruelly amusing screenplay is shooting fish in a barrel. But some of us have had it up to here with movies that are more like group hugs and the annoyingly popular insistence that art has to be somehow aspirational, so it’s refreshing when a film comes along that’s this content to be a bitch.” – North Shore Movies, 08/11/2022
SPLICED PERSONALITY 