“That this obviously kidding Kickstarter reached its goal so quickly says something uncomfortable about the increasing entitlement of fan culture and an ugly need to claim ownership over art, even if that means vandalizing it. Sending money to support some random bro on the internet’s idea how to improve a Scorsese picture strikes me as the apex of inanity.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/21/2019
“The easiest way to win an Oscar is by playing a famous dead person. Since there’s no scoreboard when it comes to judging art, a lot of folks fall back on ‘accuracy’ as a metric. I have a hunch this is why movies based on true stories always end with archival footage of their real-life subjects. It’s like putting the answers in the back of textbooks.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/20/2019
“The movie was coolly received when it opened last year’s Cannes Film Festival, but I found a fascinating formal tension at play here. Looser and pulpier than Farhadi’s previous pictures, Everybody Knows is what happens when one of our stodgier dramatists teams up with two movie stars who always look like they just finished having sex.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/14/2019
“This fleet-footed entertainment serves as sort of a stealth autobiography for Soderbergh. Ostensibly a movie about an NBA lockout, it’s really about a natural born hustler banging his head against the money men’s office windows, and how when something you love gets stuck in a stalemate, sometimes it’s necessary to knock all the pieces off the board.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/07/2019
“It’s the kind of movie that tanks at the box office and gets a lot of Razzie nominations, yet one marvels to think of what the slightly winking, sardonic tone of a De Palma or Cronenberg might have wrestled from the material. If Serenity had taken even the slightest pleasure in its own ridiculousness this could have been something very special indeed.” – North Shore Movies, 02/07/2019
“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
SPLICED PERSONALITY 