It was my great privilege to be the dumb guy talking to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Henry James scholar Megan Marshall after WBUR CitySpace’s Set In Boston screening of Merchant Ivory’s The Bostonians. Topics included the difficulties of shooting at the Athenaeum and how the movie tries to put an inspirational spin on the novel’s downbeat ending. – WBUR CitySpace, 07/11/2025
“Beverly Hills Cop is an extremely easy film to watch, floating from scene to scene on the characters’ chemistry and Murphy’s incandescent charisma. The generic crime story makes it even cozier, with familiar beats that don’t take too much focus away from the people we’re enjoying. You can see why it was #1 at the box office for 14 weeks. The movie is good company.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/11/2025
“Basically a Guardians Of The Galaxy movie in different costumes, with everyone being breezily nonchalant around garishly colored space creatures and indulging in occasional flights of po-faced sentimentality. But what works in the Marvel quip factory doesn’t mesh with the Man of Steel. There’s no awe in this Superman, no magnificence.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/10/2025
Joined my dear friend Jen Johans to discuss the eminently quotable Withnail And I, confessing how the first time I saw the movie I identified with Marwood but as the years went on I realized I’d become Withnail. I guess the next stop is Monty. Also, the great William Boyle on Jean De Florette and Manon Of The Spring plus our buddy Blake Howard on Chungking Express. – Watch With Jen, 07/07/2025
“The deathless dinosaur franchise is now on its seventh installment, a breezily uninspired piece of hackwork that passes past our eyes with a shrug. Director Gareth Edwards brings a rote semi-professionalism to the proceedings. ‘How many more times are we gonna do this?’ are the first words you hear in Jurassic World Rebirth. It’s a valid question.” – North Shore Movies, 07/03/2025
“An uncommonly astute and sometimes shockingly funny movie about the numbing aftereffects of trauma, that sticky sense of stasis while the rest of the world moves on without you. Situated in a perpetual present tense, Eva Victor’s hugely accomplished debut isn’t a film about The Bad Thing, but about how life goes on before, after and all around it.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/02/2025
“Poking merciless fun at the self-important music docs of the era, it’s a boomer hagiography in reverse. Reiner plays a documentarian tagging along for what looks like it will be the band’s final tour, downsizing from arenas to air force bases and amusement parks where they’re second billed to puppet shows. It’s the end of an error, the twilight of the dolts.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/02/2025
“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
SPLICED PERSONALITY 