“The story is a scorching, unwieldy, noir-tinted melodrama overflowing with operatic emotions and doomy fatalism. Journeyman Lewis Milestone doesn’t so much direct Robert Rossen’s script as he tries to keep up with it. In the hands of a great visual stylist (like Rossen himself) the movie could have been a masterpiece. As is, it’s still a corker.” – Crooked Marquee, 03/31/2023
“Thirty-eight years before winning the Academy Award for Best Actress, Michelle Yeoh started her career as a leading lady by slamming a heavy book of Michelangelo paintings shut on a trench-coated flasher’s junk in this nutty 1985 Hong Kong thriller. Yes, Madam! is a rather ridiculous film. But in it, you can see a superstar being born.” – Crooked Marquee, 03/24/2023
“The movie’s massiveness is part of the joke, its sheer scale the stuff of absurdist comedy. By the time we get to Paris, the overkill attains a giddy, orgiastic grandeur. Walter Hill’s The Warriors is restaged as exquisitely orchestrated automotive mayhem, then one-upped by a Buster Keaton-worthy stunt on a stubborn flight of stairs. They even borrow from Barry Lyndon.” – North Shore Movies, 03/24/2023
“The three films are dense with ideas, offering a complexity of thought that stands in sad contrast to what passes for discourse today. You can’t fit Baldwin’s worldview into a tweet. He’s funny and urbane, with no time for traditional talking points or the kind of self-congratulation you get from folks who make a big deal out of letting you know they have good politics.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/23/2023
“The city’s self-described ‘sensory bacchanalia from beyond the mainstream’ boasts fourteen features and six shorts packages covering the whole waterfront of weird. From splattery horror to environmental terrorism to alien invasions and even some Scandinavian cringe comedy, there’s something here to blow just about anybody’s ears back.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/21/2023
“One of the highlights is a honey of a performance by Richard Roundtree as an old flame of Fonda’s trying to rekindle their relationship. These two have got killer chemistry, enough to make you wish we’d gotten to see Shaft and Barbarella knock boots back in the day. This might be the first time I’ve spent a movie rooting for two octogenarians to get it on.” – North Shore Movies, 03/18/2023
“What’s left is the not inconsiderable pleasure of a fearless performer pushing himself to the brink of madness, but I can name at least a dozen other, better movies in which Willem Dafoe also does that. Inside feels dilettantish and cheap, unable to decide what it wants to say and falling back on empty aphorisms like ‘art is destruction.’ Okay, whatever.” – North Shore Movies, 03/18/2023
“Matt Ruskin’s very 2023 take on the Albert DeSalvo killings re-imagines the story for a new generation as an anachronistic girl-power parable about a stubborn podcaster—oops, I mean reporter—who beats the old boys’ network and cracks the case on her own. The film may take place in the early 1960s, but it couldn’t be more tailored to today’s sensibilities.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/16/2023
“My favorite part of this past Sunday’s ceremony was when Creed III stars Michael B. Jordan and Jonathan Majors gave out the award for Best Cinematography, turning the presentation into a delightful two-minute film school class before the nominees were read. It was fun to watch, and you learned a little something about how movies are made.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/16/2023
“Dour and intensely unpleasant to watch, 65 is the dreariest, most depressing movie ever made about a spaceman using a ray gun to fight dinosaurs. God forbid something like that might be fun. Do you know why James Cameron didn’t show us Newt sobbing inconsolably over the dead bodies of her mom and dad? Because he’s an entertainer, not a sadistic moron.” – North Shore Movies, 03/10/2023
SPLICED PERSONALITY 