”There’s a wrenching resignation in Kristofferson’s eyes when his demo tapes are ignored by industry players who only called for his drug connections. The movie chronicles an ego death by a thousand pinpricks, the most amusingly brutal being when a groupie played by Joy Bang tells Kristofferson and Stanton that their big hit was her favorite song in junior high.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/12/2024
”One of the most formally confident movies I’ve seen this year. I could go on all day about Perkins’ smart stylistic flourishes and his command of cinematic grammar. What I can’t tell you is what the film is supposed to be about, or why we should be invested beyond the bravura technique. Longlegs is an extremely unsettling experience. It’s also rather an empty one.” – North Shore Movies, 07/12/2024
””It’s interesting to think about a time when Hollywood made movies for adults,’ explains Tamm. ‘What does it say about the end of the 20th century that 25 years on, we’re not making movies like this anymore? Is that necessarily a good thing? I don’t know. There are some deeper, thornier questions in these films that mainstream movies aren’t asking anymore.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/10/2024
”Better than it probably should be but still not very good. There’s a comfort food quality to this stroll down memory lane. It feels like one of those sitcom reunion movies that networks used to produce back in the ‘80s, coasting on familiar faces and a catchy theme song. It’ll play best on Netflix, where most people will be watching it while doing something else.” – North Shore Movies, 07/02/2024
”Rushed and overwritten, with West constantly putting the cart before the horse to shoehorn as many homages and semiotic asides as he can cram into a given scene. But such self-reflexive wankery only goes so far unless you’ve got something to say, and MaXXXine is one of those movies that confuses talking about big ideas with actually having them.” – North Shore Movies, 07/01/2024
“Unfulfilled longing runs the circle ‘round in Jacques Demy’s enchanting, heartsick 1961 debut, a film in which — as the song goes — everybody needs somebody to love, even when they don’t love you back. To Demy, a poet of heartache, unrequited love remains an essential and inevitable element of the human condition; the most wonderful, horrible part of being alive.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/28/2024
”What’s refreshing is that there aren’t any overt lessons being learned here. This trip isn’t going to change either of their lives, no matter how bad the traffic. What Hall’s film captures is something far more important and elusive. It’s about how an unexpected human connection, even one as fleeting as a cab ride, can deepen the way we see the world around us.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/27/2024
“As with Baker’s plays, the silences are long and the dialogue oblique. Janet Planet can occasionally be a frustrating picture. The playwright’s penchant for real-time longueurs doesn’t always translate as well to the screen as it plays onstage, where being boring on purpose carries with it an entirely different electricity. But the movie has a canny, cumulative effect.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/27/2024
”Schrader and Springsteen have always shared simpatico sensibilities, wearing their small town, religious upbringings on their sleeves. The alienated loners driving all night on albums like Darkness On The Edge Of Town and Nebraska could easily be Paul Schrader protagonists, and the plot of Blue Collar sounds like something out of a Springsteen song.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/26/2024
“Nichols’ heavily fictionalized adaptation plays up the romantic grandeur of Lyon’s photographs, his camera caressing the brooding visage of Austin Butler as a reckless ne’er-do-well so stupid he instigates a police chase and then runs out of gas. It’s a pretty good metaphor for the movie itself, which is full of striking images that never really go anywhere.” – North Shore Movies, 06/21/2024
SPLICED PERSONALITY 