“It makes perfect sense that the gateway to perdition would end up being opened by a bunch of little assholes on TikTok. This nifty, nasty Australian thriller posits demonic possession as the latest stupidly dangerous social media challenge to go viral. It’s an auspicious debut. There’s a bracing meanness to the movie that keeps you guessing where it’s gonna go.” – North Shore Movies, 07/30/2023
“A manhunt movie suffused with melancholy longing for past glories in the face of a morose, mundane present. Disguised as a film noir, it’s actually a precursor to the early 1960s British kitchen sink dramas, one crime plot away from This Sporting Life or Saturday Night And Sunday Morning. I’m guessing this was an important film for a young Mike Leigh.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/28/2023
“A cautionary fable in which nature is dangerously out of balance. In synopsis it probably sounds pretty strident. But the movie never feels like a lecture because Alegría is a filmmaker far more interested in images than dialogue. There’s a mesmerizing rhythm to the picture, juxtaposing magic realist flights of fancy with an almost abstract, poetic sensibility.” – North Shore Movies, 07/28/2023
“I like to say that I would watch Nicolas Cage in anything, and it often feels as if I do. Sympathy For The Devil is barely a movie. It’s a nothing-budget quickie Cage appears to have taken as a personal challenge, going bugfuck bonkers amid the somnambulistic surroundings to try and make something memorable by sheer force of will. He very nearly pulls it off.” – North Shore Movies, 07/28/2023
“The improbable billion-dollar boom surrounding those small stuffed animals is a fascinating, totally ‘90s tale of irrational exuberance and the rise of the internet. Unfortunately, this perfect storm of sociological circumstances scarcely interests the makers of The Beanie Bubble, a flaccid, grindingly one-note portrait of a craven CEO and the women he wronged.” – North Shore Movies, 07/28/2023
“Released a year after The Bad News Bears, Slap Shot comes from a cultural moment when foul-mouthed sports comedies were how America explained itself to itself. It’s no coincidence that the opening credits unspool over Old Glory, and the country depicted is at a dead end. What else is left to do but get out there on the ice and goon it up for the crowd?” – Crooked Marquee, 07/21/2023
“However disparate in content and tone, Barbie and Oppenheimer are both distinctive visions from filmmakers who have a lot on their minds. You can wait all summer for a blockbuster that’s actually about something, and here come two on the same day. But I don’t recommend trying to do them as a double feature, no matter what Tom Cruise says.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/20/2023
“Allen might be the only primary creative force of the 1970s New Hollywood movement who never became a household name. Hagiographies of that era tend to trend toward blowhard, masculine director types, but it was this prim and proper female cutter who redefined the shapes and sounds of the most fertile decade in American cinema.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/18/2023
“The irony should not be lost on anyone that the freshest movie in multiplexes right now is the seventh installment of a decades-old franchise based on a 1960s television program. But as its star reminded us last summer, ‘It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot.’ The tireless Tom Cruise and company have outdone themselves again. This is a preposterously entertaining picture.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/14/2023
“Adele Lim’s gleefully vulgar directorial debut sends four friends on a raunchy road trip to China, toppling every prim and proper Asian stereotype along the way. Joy Ride is an awfully generic title, but I suppose it makes sense when you learn that Lim and co-screenwriters Teresa Hsiao and Cherry Chevapravatdumrong originally called it The Joy Fuck Club.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/06/2023
SPLICED PERSONALITY 