“A time capsule of two strutting young actors who were about to take over Hollywood, right before it didn’t quite happen. The film is a marvel of peacocking machismo, with two big, preening performances trying to top each other in every scene. When I was growing up The Pope Of Greenwich Village was everybody’s older brother’s favorite movie.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/20/2025
“How can you use arts and culture to help people understand and get connected to certain issues? We always talk about film as a catalyst for conversation and we have built into the festival opportunities to have deeper discussions around these screenings. We’re bringing in people from organizations doing work in these spaces to do Q&As with the community.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/16/2025
“This is so idiotic one hardly knows where to begin. The Life Of Chuck is a two-hour barrage of soft-focus smiles, vaguely mystical, New Age noodling, and gaseous platitudes about carpe-ing the diem, etc. The characters speak to each other in such meaningless aphorisms, Flanagan’s dialogue sounds like a gangbang in the greeting card aisle.” – North Shore Movies, 06/14/2025
“I can’t imagine what seeing The Mortal Storm must have been like for audiences when it was first released, but I can tell you how unsettling it is now. Eighty-five years ago it might have been distracting to watch Hollywood stars playing Germans who slip into authoritarianism. Today their American accents just make the movie seem more sickeningly timely.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/13/2025
“Song is trying to take the heightened genre conventions and bring them back down to Earth. Materialists is too high-minded a movie to come up with a contrived misunderstanding that results in a classic rom-com, running-through-the-airport ending. But without that kind of corny catharsis, the film doesn’t end so much as it deflates into the closing credits.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/12/2025
“Critic and curator Michael Koresky’s fantastic new book surveys 25 years of subversive subtext roiling and rumbling under the Technicolor surfaces of Hollywood films that followed the letter of the Hays Code but not the spirit. It’s a rollicking work of scholarship willing to take a close, thoughtful look at pictures deemed ‘problematic’ by today’s standards.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/12/2025
Joined my dear old NYU friend Jason Shawhan for a bonus episode of his podcast devoted to all things Jennifer Jason Leigh. We talked about returning to visit our old stomping grounds in New York City one month after 9/11 and how we wound up seeing JJL on Broadway in David Auburn’s Proof. A digressive reminiscence of a strange and nervous time. – Fearless Pretender, 06/06/2025
“It may sound strange to describe a Wes Anderson film as the summer’s most delightful action-comedy. Missing the usual Anderson undercurrents of grief and melancholy, it’s more gag-based than anything he’s done in ages, with an early bit involving a plane’s ejector seat so exquisitely timed it caused me to make a spectacle of myself at the press screening.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/05/2025
“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
SPLICED PERSONALITY 