”In the films of John Cassavetes, love is madness. It’s noisy, disruptive and it breaks stuff. Minnie And Moskowitz is as close as the director ever came to shooting a straight love story… if anything in this cockeyed fairy tale can be described as straight, given all the punching and hollering and pounding on doors one comes to expect in Cassavetes country.” – Crooked Marquee, 03/29/2024
“In synopsis, it probably doesn’t sound like much: a few weeks in the lives of a Taiwanese family after their grandma gets sick. Yet this is one of those movies so emotionally expansive that you feel like it might contain the whole of human experience. Yi Yi begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral, heartbreakingly attuned to the cycles and seasons of life.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/27/2024
”An innocuous, family adventure film with too many characters and a severe shortage of jokes. Nobody is given anything especially funny to say, but these are skilled performers who can recite placeholder dialogue with comic intonations that occasionally trick your ear into thinking you’ve heard something clever. This is kind of Rudd’s whole deal as an actor.” – North Shore Movies, 03/20/2024
”Rowdy Herrington’s original Road House remains one of the finest of aged ‘80s cheeses. The greatest movie ever directed by someone named Rowdy, it is a film completely comfortable in its own absurdity. By contrast, the remake is uneasy, skittish even. Liman can’t settle on a consistent tone. It’s always either trying too hard or undercutting itself.” – North Shore Movies, 03/19/2024
“Killer spiders, pregnant nuns, ex-con Juggalos and humanist vampires, oh my. It must be BUFF season again. Now in its twenty-fourth year, the self-described ‘annual sensory bacchanalia from beyond the mainstream’ is back at the Brattle Theatre to celebrate the oddest and most outré cinematic offerings covering the whole waterfront of weird.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/18/2024
”A freaky-deaky film noir steeped in body horror and bodily fluids, it’s a sicko comic cross between the Coen brothers and David Cronenberg. Love Lies Bleeding starts out like one of those rural neo-noirs from the era in which it is set, lifting elements from Blood Simple and At Close Range before blossoming into something much stranger and all its own.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/14/2024
“Lords was one of many movies I never actually saw as a kid, but had vividly envisioned a fantasy film in my head based on the VHS box art. The cover shot of Winkler and Stallone in tough guy leather jackets had me imagining an origin story for Fonzie in which he fought in a street gang alongside a young Rocky Balboa. How could any real movie compete with that?” – Crooked Marquee, 03/08/2024
Joined friends Justin and Laura Khoo for our own private awards show celebrating the best films and performances of 2023, plus some other silly categories like Best Lisp and a lot more Nyad discussion than I think anybody was expecting. Their one-award-per-film rule prompted some surprising choices and kept this from becoming The Oppenheimer Hour. – Cows In The Field, 03/08/2024
“There are six credited screenwriters on Peter Farrelly’s latest picture, as well at two more writers credited with the story. That’s a lot of paychecks for a script that feels like it was knocked out in an afternoon. As a critic who has expressed a preference for the filmmaker’s earlier, funnier movies, Ricky Stanicky serves as a reminder to be careful what you wish for.” – North Shore Movies, 03/08/2024
“If you ask me, Margot Robbie delivered one of 2023’s most skillful turns as Barbie’s titular toy, but the Academy has always shied away from honoring comedic performances in leading roles. The real bias here is a slant toward self-seriousness. Comic timing as deft as Robbie’s stands no chance against Carey Mulligan dying of cancer with a mid-Atlantic accent.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/07/2024
SPLICED PERSONALITY 