“But the festival’s outsized influence over the decades obviously hasn’t always been to everyone’s benefit. Sundance has helped cement the stereotype of an indie film director as a white boy genius with a beard and baseball cap. This legend is often dutifully transcribed by critics like myself, who also tend to be white dudes with beards and baseball caps.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/01/2019
“Jackson and his post-production wizards haven’t just meticulously restored the footage, they’ve colorized and converted it to 3D, reframing it for widescreen and adding a shattering soundtrack. The result collapses the gulf between past and present, bringing history to life in one of the most visceral experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theater.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/31/2019
“A marvel of concision. Here’s a love story spanning almost two decades of seismic geopolitical shifts, but Pawlikowski renders it in clipped ellipses. A movie of furtive kisses and stolen glances, it’s all short, punchy scenes and sad songs with entire years left off-camera to our imaginations. The story skips like a stone across time, to devastating effect.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/18/2019
“More concerned with sensorial experience than narrative threads, the film is a collection of jagged, fleeting moments and atmospheric longueurs adding up to something far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s the kind of movie you have to swim around in for a little while. Eventually, you’ll find yourself beginning to feel the muggy air of these summer evenings.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/17/2019
“This is one strange shambles of a movie. The scale is all out of whack, nothing but drab industrial office spaces and a dingy basement. Even the supposedly futuristic scientific tools resemble crummy construction equipment, with Reeves doing his work in a flimsy helmet with a plastic face shield that makes him look like a guy who fixes telephone poles.” – North Shore Movies, 01/12/2019
“The marketing campaign and awards play have centered on Kidman’s transformation, which is the kind of thing critics are supposed to call ‘brave.’ Honestly I found it all a bit silly and way overdone, wallowing in over-deliberate grotesquerie as some misguided mark of integrity. Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good description of the movie itself.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/11/2019
“For me, the ending’s meaning has always been more elusive, making visceral the sensation of having this story and these people we’ve grown to love over many years violently ripped away forever without a moment’s warning, abruptly plunging us into silence and nothingness. It’s a death scene alright, but we’re the ones who got whacked.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/09/2019
“As the title might have tipped you off, it isn’t exactly heavy on plot. This largely improvised film has the loose rhythms of day-to-day life, with the director hanging back and regarding his characters in mostly unobtrusive medium shots. A lot of it could pass for a documentary, until upon reflection you realize how carefully Esparza’s set up his story beats.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/04/2019
“The movie presents common knowledge with gasps of shock and awe. It’s like getting a breathless lecture on something you lived through from someone who just learned about it yesterday. McKay never settles on a through-line. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened, shuffled all out of order and repeated a few times extra loud for the cheap seats.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/25/2018
“The crackerjack ensemble makes a meal out of Baldwin’s prose. Jenkins loves letting his characters speak directly into the lens, lending a gutsy emotional immediacy while James Laxton’s breathtaking cinematography grants even the tackiest 1970s orange and yellow decor an ethereal glow. It’s an achingly beautiful film, and so terribly sad.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/25/2018
SPLICED PERSONALITY 