“Unfulfilled longing runs the circle ‘round in Jacques Demy’s enchanting, heartsick 1961 debut, a film in which — as the song goes — everybody needs somebody to love, even when they don’t love you back. To Demy, a poet of heartache, unrequited love remains an essential and inevitable element of the human condition; the most wonderful, horrible part of being alive.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/28/2024
”What’s refreshing is that there aren’t any overt lessons being learned here. This trip isn’t going to change either of their lives, no matter how bad the traffic. What Hall’s film captures is something far more important and elusive. It’s about how an unexpected human connection, even one as fleeting as a cab ride, can deepen the way we see the world around us.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/27/2024
“As with Baker’s plays, the silences are long and the dialogue oblique. Janet Planet can occasionally be a frustrating picture. The playwright’s penchant for real-time longueurs doesn’t always translate as well to the screen as it plays onstage, where being boring on purpose carries with it an entirely different electricity. But the movie has a canny, cumulative effect.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/27/2024
”Schrader and Springsteen have always shared simpatico sensibilities, wearing their small town, religious upbringings on their sleeves. The alienated loners driving all night on albums like Darkness On The Edge Of Town and Nebraska could easily be Paul Schrader protagonists, and the plot of Blue Collar sounds like something out of a Springsteen song.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/26/2024
“Nichols’ heavily fictionalized adaptation plays up the romantic grandeur of Lyon’s photographs, his camera caressing the brooding visage of Austin Butler as a reckless ne’er-do-well so stupid he instigates a police chase and then runs out of gas. It’s a pretty good metaphor for the movie itself, which is full of striking images that never really go anywhere.” – North Shore Movies, 06/21/2024
“Boomer rock docs have calcified into such a boilerplate, bulletproof formula that as a critic I often have trouble finding anything to say about them. If you like the artist, you’ll enjoy the movie. But even die-hard fans might find Disciple a bit excessive. Do we really need a 147-minute documentary about the third-best guitarist in the E Street Band?” – North Shore Movies, 06/21/2024
Friends Blake Howard, Scout Tafoya and I all contributed essays to the upcoming Imprint Collection Film Focus: Harvey Keitel box set, so Blake got us on the mic to talk about the actor’s singular career and his honorary Catholic status, as well as the stubborn integrity and artistic fearlessness Keitel came to epitomize during the 1990s indie film revolution. – One Heat Minute, 06/20/2024
For this episode of Watch With Jen, novelist S.A. Cosby selected four of his favorite underdiscussed crime films, Abel Ferrara’s The Funeral, Ted Demme’s Blow, James Gray’s We Own The Night and the Hughes Brothers’ Menace II Society. He and host Jen Johans discuss the cycles of tragic masculinity that figure so powerfully in his work while I make stupid jokes. – Watch With Jen, 06/19/2024
“’Festivals offer the opportunity to use film as a catalyst so that we can all be in one place, in person, to have a conversation and feel that energy in the room,’ said Simmons. ‘It’s important for filmmakers to screen their films in front of an audience that gets to ask them questions, to see the reactions, to get that feedback. That’s an important part of being an artist.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/19/2024
”The inchoate animosity against the Brat Pack that I feel like McCarthy is trying to pin down here was a resentment that the surplus of teen-focused entertainments in the 1980s signified Hollywood’s shift away from adult-oriented material. It goes without saying that nobody in the documentary dares to bring up the fact that most of these movies just weren’t very good.” – North Shore Movies, 06/14/2024
SPLICED PERSONALITY 