“Linklater turns the unorthodox production of Breathless into one of his ramshackle hangout comedies like Dazed And Confused or Everybody Wants Some!!, except with cinephiles instead of stoners and jocks. Aubry Dullin’s laid-back, up-for-anything boxer-turned-actor Jean-Paul Belmondo could have strolled out of either of those party pictures.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/31/2025
“Blue Moon is basically a movie about pretending to be happy at your ex’s wedding. Ethan Hawke’s tour-de-force performance runs an extraordinary gamut of emotions from pettiness to horniness to heartbreak, spitting catty quips and spinning long-winded stories like he’s afraid that if he stops talking for a second everyone will realize how sad he is.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/31/2025
“Keaton is incandescent in the film, an instant icon in her wide-brimmed hats and men’s ties. Alvy jokes about her black soap and adult education classes, but we can see Annie is an explorer. The gift of Keaton’s performance – which is even more remarkable given the non-chronological structure – is how she allows us to observe Annie growing into herself.” – Crooked Marquee, 10/24/2025
”Lanthimos lingers on the squalor, leering at the ugly haircuts and bad food in irritatingly asymmetrical compositions. But as always, he’s wallowing from a safe distance, making another movie in which the human race is put on trial and found wanting. I never feel like he considers himself part of the problem. His films don’t hurt because he doesn’t have any skin in the game.” – North Shore Movies, 10/24/2025
“Reichardt has been teaching film at Bard College since 2006, and her bone dry dismantling of macho heist picture fantasies got me and a friend imagining an instructor who’s had it up to here with the crime drama fixations of her young male students. Without knowing for sure, I’d be willing to guess that Kelly Reichardt has some pretty strong feelings about the movie Heat.” – North Shore Movies, 10/24/2025
“As enervating a movie experience as you’ll have this year. Cartoonishly reductive and crassly fictionalized in the manner of most formula Hollywood biopics, yet stubbornly absent any of the genre’s cheeseball satisfactions. It wears its joylessness as a point of pride, drowning in a dour self-importance that reflects poorly on both the filmmakers and their subject.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/23/2025
“Del Toro has always had more affinity for his monsters than men, and Elordi’s tender creature is so much more interesting than Isaac’s off-putting, one-note doctor that the movie doesn’t come alive until he does, which is unfortunately over an hour into the 149-minute feature. Frankenstein is as visually extravagant as it is dramatically undercooked.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/21/2025
“The nice thing about living in one of the greatest movie cities in the world is that there are more than 40 horror flicks you can go see on a giant screen with a sound system that blows away any setup you have at home. Besides, there’s something healthy about screaming along with strangers. It reminds us that we’re all in this together.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/21/2025
“The 89-year-old Allen’s debut novel is tangy and bitter, slipping an amusingly corrosive one-liner into just about every paragraph. The man is still a joke machine, and he’s at his funniest when he lets his contempt hang out like it does here, taking potshots at both his loser protagonist and the Manhattan culture vultures who might be right to consider him beneath them.” – North Shore Movies, 10/20/2025
My buddy Blake Howard called from the Adelaide Film Festival, where he’d just seen director Mike Figgis’ all-access documentary about the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. We discussed our love for FFC and how we wish he could have made a dozen movies with Aubrey Plaza. We also talked about what a pain in the ass Shia LaBeouf seems to be. – One Heat Minute, 10/16/2025
SPLICED PERSONALITY 