”Scenes play out in single, unbroken takes as the spectral spectator drifts up and down the stairs, darting in and out of bedrooms. If nothing else, it’s an incredible feat of athleticism by the 62-year-old camera operator. I got tired just watching some of these shots. Presence is a gimmick movie with a great gimmick. Too bad about the ‘movie’ part.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/23/2025
Joined Philadelphia expat Lee Stabert to talk about the Boston crime movie craze and my pet theory that these films became popular because they allow Hollywood to make underclass gangster movies without having to cast Black people. We also discussed the willful nostalgia of these films harkening back to a pre-gentrification Boston before the biotech boom. – Explain Boston To Me, 01/22/2025
“It’s a brilliant device, externalizing how the performer sees himself as a dancing monkey. (I know a chimp is an ape, not a monkey, but we don’t need to be pedantic about it. This is why nobody likes Neil deGrasse Tyson.) Celebrity makes people strange and sets them apart from others. Crowds can’t help but stare, the way they would at a chimp wearing a tuxedo.” – North Shore Movies, 01/17/2025
Can a well-regarded Oscar-winner still feel underrated? On a subscribers only episode of The Decade Project, Blake Howard and I talk about Steven Spielberg’s 2015 collaboration with the Coen brothers, a sly civics lesson with a killer Hanks performance and some classically Coen-esque wordplay. A film full of the unshowy artistry folks foolishly take for granted. – One Heat Minute, 01/16/2025
“Thick with the heavy, gun-metal austerity of films like Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and Todd Field’s Tár, The Brutalist sometimes feels like a director trying to will a masterpiece into being. Corbet very nearly gets there. The filmmaking hums with purpose and import, paced at a marvelously brisk clip. The textures and scale of the movie are astonishing.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/09/2025
”The first half of Hard Truths winds up Pansy and sends her blasting away with motormouth jags and pity any poor shopkeepers, grocery clerks or innocent bystanders who happen to get in the way. Some of these scenes, such as a sidesplitting riff on baby clothes, feel like they could be from a British Afro-Caribbean version of Curb Your Enthusiasm.” – North Shore Movies, 01/09/2025
“An awards season narrative in search of a movie. The wispy, barely-there screenplay by sitcom writer Kate Gersten is a logline padded out to 85 minutes. I’d initially hoped the incessant montages were some sort of sly tribute to Baywatch, but they seem mostly intended to get the movie up to feature length. The Last Showgirl would barely be an hour without them.” – North Shore Movies, 01/09/2025
“It took some time for me to figure out why The Room Next Door sounded so familiar, and then I realized that the dialogue is straight out of an ‘80s Woody Allen movie. These are verbose New Yorkers musing about art, literature, morality and death. If you recast the leads with Mia Farrow and Dianne Wiest, the film could be from Allen’s Another Woman era.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/07/2025
“Hurtles through the 178-minute running time at a breathless clip, with nods to modern franchise films that remind us how Dumas was writing the original action blockbusters some 200 years ago. The movie feels like it owes a lot to Nolan’s Dark Knight pictures, then you remember how much Nolan’s Dark Knight pictures owe to The Count Of Monte Cristo.” – North Shore Movies, 01/07/2025
Had a nice chat with Hanna Ali for WBUR’s The Weekender. The subject was movies where snow sets the scene, so I picked Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys, Steven Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Also, shout-outs to Dr. Zhivago, Batman Returns and anything where James Bond is skiing. – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/03/2025
SPLICED PERSONALITY 