“Remember those straight-to-video spin-offs that used to clog the shelves at your local Blockbuster, offering the cheaper and less star-studded continuing adventures of Tremors, From Dusk ‘Till Dawn or American Pie Presents? The blatantly lousy Ballerina is not so much beating a dead horse as it’s making sure all the parts have been ground up for dog food.” – North Shore Movies, 06/05/2025
“This is a movie about a beautiful woman on a big shitty boat trying to fight off a psycho who wants to make her a meal for sharks, and the filmmakers understand that this premise is enough. At a time when so many horror films have been overthought into tedious dissertations, it’s a relief to find one that has nothing on its mind beyond showing you a good time.” – North Shore Movies, 06/05/2025
“Revisiting Dogma, we see an artist’s ambitions stretched beyond his abilities. The movie is a failure, but an honest one. It’s sad to watch today, knowing Smith would never again swing for the fences like this, spending the next 25 years catering to an undiscerning fanbase with reflexive indolence, turning his own laziness and incompetence into part of the joke.” – North Shore Movies, 06/05/2025
“Danny and Michael Philippou’s gnarly Hansel And Gretel riff follows two grieving step-siblings in the hands of a sinister foster mother played to the hilt by Sally Hawkins. In most movies like this when you’re supposed to believe a child is in danger, a part of you knows that the filmmakers wouldn’t dare kill off a little kid. These dudes would totally kill a little kid.” – North Shore Movies, 05/30/2025
“The thing about Irishmen is that they’re really good at telling stories, and whenever Bono tones down the airy abstractions and gets rooted in the specific, the movie becomes quite winning. The best parts involve the superstar’s fraught relationship with his emotionally withholding father. Get an Irish guy going about their Da and it’s gonna be a teary evening.” – North Shore Movies, 05/29/2025
“This unproduced screenplay penned by Brian De Palma in the 1990s is the blueprint for a most eccentric thriller. It’s a heady, tongue-in-cheek swirl of the director’s pet preoccupations, with the villain’s plan modeled on the opera house climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much. De Palma is literally weaponizing his love of Hitchcock here.” – North Shore Movies, 05/29/2025
“There’s not much to Thompson’s play beyond folksy wisecracks and pat affirmations. But director Mark Rydell’s big-screen version boasts an alchemical element which makes On Golden Pond far more than the sum of its treacly parts. The leads aren’t just movie stars, they’re movie legends. It’s twilight for the Thayers, and for an entire era of Hollywood.” – Crooked Marquee, 05/23/2025
“An unseemly amount of the dialogue in The Final Reckoning is like Baldwin’s ‘living manifestation of destiny’ speech, except not played for laughs. There are films about the life of Christ that spend less time proclaiming the divinity of their protagonist. Yet just like in the movies, right when all seems lost, Cruise miraculously comes through.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/22/2025
Had a terrific time talking to old friend and George V. Higgins expert Jake Mulligan about The Friends Of Eddie Coyle for WBUR CitySpace’s Set In Boston series. We discussed how the film spawned an entire genre of Boston crime films, even though none that followed had a fraction of the verisimilitude. Also, an excuse to tell some amazing Mitchum stories. – WBUR CitySpace, 05/16/2025
“’Somehow in the screwed up world in which we find ourselves, a ghastly amount of people have lost sight of the fact that these are the bad guys,’ says the Somerville Theatre’s Ian Judge. ‘This narrative cannot be allowed to be blurred by modern day losers stoking the flames of antisemitism and fascism. These movies help us remember who we are at our best.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/15/2025
SPLICED PERSONALITY 