”Franchise filmmaking has become a drearily televisual affair; medium shots of actors standing in front of greenscreens in Georgia warehouses. Filmed on gigantic sets in locations around the world, these Dune pictures feel like gosh darn movies, referencing shots from Lawrence Of Arabia and Apocalypse Now not just as homages, but as aspirational markers.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/29/2024
”And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time before I see another film as stubbornly soporific as Netflix’s dreary sci-fi drama Spaceman. There’s about 20 minutes of story here stretched out to nearly two hours, the movie idling alongside the spacecraft. This is the gloomiest, most humorless Sandler picture yet, and I’m including the one about 9/11.” – North Shore Movies, 02/29/2024
”A cavalcade of gags and stunts with the zany cartoon logic of Bugs and company at their best, flinging the characters around in antic set pieces that first defy the laws of physics then play them for unexpected payoffs. Shot in high contrast black-and-white, the movie has the undercranked aesthetic of an old-timey silent short revved up for TikTok attention spans.” – North Shore Movies, 02/29/2024
”Garrone’s Gomorrah was distinguished by a deeply researched examination of mob mechanics. He’s taken the same approach here, culling the screenplay from actual experiences of Senegalese migrants. What’s most horrifying is not the brutal desert crossing, but rather the vicious underground economy that has sprung up around these needy travelers.” – North Shore Movies, 02/23/2024
“A fun example of how cool and influential a film can be without being particularly good. The existential moonshiner melodrama stuck around for so many years at the bottom of double bills, distributors took to calling it ‘the Gone With The Wind of drive-ins.’ Thunder Road was a counterculture B-picture before anyone really knew what those were yet.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/23/2024
“Forensic auteurism may be a fool’s errand with collaborators as close as the Coens, nevertheless I think we now know which brother wrote the dildo joke in Burn After Reading. Drive-Away Dolls is a filthy, high-spirited farce that presumably sets some sort of record for the number of sex toys featured in a film released by a major studio subsidiary.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/22/2024
“It became a joke among my friends last year that nobody was surprised I loved a movie about an old-fashioned film enthusiast who listens to a lot of Lou Reed and reads paperback books in bars. (I don’t clean toilets for a living, but I did have to review Madame Web.) Still, it wasn’t so funny when Perfect Days was almost one of the last films this critic ever saw.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/21/2024
”Sayles and Springsteen’s sensibilities are so simpatico it’s impossible to imagine the movie without his music. Both artists share a complex understanding of the American experience in all its maddening contradictions, plus enormous affinities for regular folks whose lives are full and have stories worth telling, even as their dreams remain stubbornly out of reach.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/16/2024
“A picaresque road trip through a country that has lost its common cause. And a lot of its common sense. This bracing, nervy comedy about our collapsing societal infrastructure follows a little girl lost in a post-MAGA America that’s a carnival of subcultures all siloed off from one another. It’s a place where everybody’s talking, but only to themselves.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/15/2024
“Garbage, reminiscent of the fly-by-night comic flicks companies like New Line used to crank out in the nineties. But honestly, I’d rather sit through one of these Sony B-movie bootlegs than another bloated, 165-minute Marvel epic that cost $200 million and wastes a cast full of Academy Award winners and then everyone gets mad if you don’t pretend like it’s a real movie.” – North Shore Movies, 02/15/2024
SPLICED PERSONALITY 