“This is not a movie designed to surprise you. The pleasures lie in the confidence with which it hits the familiar beats, moving gracefully between set-pieces and montages while doodling character flourishes in the margins of tried and true formulas. There’s something comforting about how completely in command Kosinski and company are of their cliches.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/26/2025
“Veering off into incoherent espionage techno-thriller territory, it feels like they decided to just shoot the notes from a brainstorming session instead of going to the trouble of turning them into a screenplay. Promising ideas are picked up and discarded minutes later, as if trying to cram in a bunch of crappy sequels at once. Like most upgrades, it’s full of bugs.” – North Shore Movies, 06/25/2025
“Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece is one of the best arguments for the superiority of the 70mm format — a heady sound and light spectacular stretching from the dawn of man to Jupiter and beyond the infinite. The experience of seeing it on a massive screen with a rapt audience having their minds collectively melted is a defining moment in one’s moviegoing life.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/24/2025
“The second sequel to Danny Boyle’s 2003 zombie shocker is the first chapter of a new trilogy, so it spends a galling amount of screen time setting up later installments. This is frustrating because there’s some really good stuff in here – a lot of it quite beautiful and strange – but none of it has been arranged into the rising and descending action of a story. It’s just stuff.” – North Shore Movies, 06/20/2025
“A time capsule of two strutting young actors who were about to take over Hollywood, right before it didn’t quite happen. The film is a marvel of peacocking machismo, with two big, preening performances trying to top each other in every scene. When I was growing up The Pope Of Greenwich Village was everybody’s older brother’s favorite movie.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/20/2025
“How can you use arts and culture to help people understand and get connected to certain issues? We always talk about film as a catalyst for conversation and we have built into the festival opportunities to have deeper discussions around these screenings. We’re bringing in people from organizations doing work in these spaces to do Q&As with the community.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/16/2025
“This is so idiotic one hardly knows where to begin. The Life Of Chuck is a two-hour barrage of soft-focus smiles, vaguely mystical, New Age noodling, and gaseous platitudes about carpe-ing the diem, etc. The characters speak to each other in such meaningless aphorisms, Flanagan’s dialogue sounds like a gangbang in the greeting card aisle.” – North Shore Movies, 06/14/2025
“I can’t imagine what seeing The Mortal Storm must have been like for audiences when it was first released, but I can tell you how unsettling it is now. Eighty-five years ago it might have been distracting to watch Hollywood stars playing Germans who slip into authoritarianism. Today their American accents just make the movie seem more sickeningly timely.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/13/2025
“Song is trying to take the heightened genre conventions and bring them back down to Earth. Materialists is too high-minded a movie to come up with a contrived misunderstanding that results in a classic rom-com, running-through-the-airport ending. But without that kind of corny catharsis, the film doesn’t end so much as it deflates into the closing credits.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/12/2025
“Critic and curator Michael Koresky’s fantastic new book surveys 25 years of subversive subtext roiling and rumbling under the Technicolor surfaces of Hollywood films that followed the letter of the Hays Code but not the spirit. It’s a rollicking work of scholarship willing to take a close, thoughtful look at pictures deemed ‘problematic’ by today’s standards.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/12/2025
SPLICED PERSONALITY 