”He was so much taller and blonder and better-looking than everyone around him, like some sort of storybook Nordic prince. But taking another look at the films in the Brattle retrospective, one comes away with how much the actor loved to undercut his matinee idol appearance. Kilmer may have looked like a golden god, but he was often a very silly goose.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/12/2025
Joined my buddy Blake Howard to discuss my favorite Gene Hackman performance. The Criterion Collection just put out a spiffy edition of Night Moves, director Arthur Penn’s definitive Watergate noir in which Hackman’s private eye becomes the avatar of an exhausted era, playing a game in which nobody’s winning. One side’s just losing slower than the other. – One Heat Minute, 05/12/2025
”Not a lot of film students wind up having their homework released by a major studio, but the then-27-year-old wunderkind could never be accused of thinking small. Coppola’s freewheeling adaptation of David Benedictus’ 1963 novel has style and ambition to burn. It’s a wild, visually spectacular calling card in the service of material that’s honestly pretty puerile.” – Crooked Marquee, 05/09/2025
“The world of David Mamet is divided between hustlers and marks. You’re either playing an angle or you’re being played. Henry Johnson could be the playwright’s bluntest expression of these themes yet, one of those late period works in which artists of a certain age stop smuggling their ideas underneath the drama and just come out and say what they mean.” – North Shore Movies, 05/08/2025
”If your mom doesn’t have the stomach for the Brattle’s annual Mother’s Day screening of Psycho, you’ll have plenty of options on the other side of the square. The Harvard Film Archive’s Mother’s Day Mini-Marathon features seven 35mm prints of big screen classics examining maternal love in all its complex and sometimes maddening dimensions.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/08/2025
”Calling it the best Marvel movie in years isn’t saying much, but it’s something. Thunderbolts* reminds us that the reason those early MCU adventures caught on was not because of special effects or intergalactic lore, but because they were workplace comedies about characters we enjoyed spending time with. Modest charms are nonetheless charming.” – North Shore Movies, 05/05/2025
”Palaud exhibits no interest whatsoever in her subject’s accomplishments, skipping immediately ahead to the drudgery of her heroin addiction. The indictments of boorish behavior by men in the film industry are indeed apt, but what’s ironic is that by refusing to see Schneider as an artist, the movie is guilty of some of the same sins as the director it tries to demonize.” – North Shore Movies, 05/05/2025
“If there’s a conspiracy that means your wife died for a reason. One of the things about people dying, especially when they die young, is that it seems meaningless. We have evolved to look for meaning in everything. It’s one of the strengths and weaknesses of our species. And if you can’t find meaning, you invent meaning, and that’s what a conspiracy theory is.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/24/2025
”Coward’s screenplay is a marvel of construction, beginning with the end of the affair as seen by a nosy neighbor of Laura’s who has no idea what kind of emotionally volatile farewell she’s just wandered into. Neither do we, until the scene is replayed at the end of the picture. Meanwhile the trains come and go, carrying missed connections and broken hearts.” – Crooked Marquee, 04/18/2025
“In a movie year without big-name, buzzy breakouts from Sundance or South By Southwest, IFFBoston is relying more on documentaries and foreign language films and less on marquee stars. Having been able to preview some of this year’s offerings, I found the scrappy lineup characteristically excellent, even if some of the topics sound like tough sells.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/17/2025
SPLICED PERSONALITY 