“The staggeringly prolific South Korean filmmaker has directed 17 features in the past decade alone. But there’s comfort in the consistency of his preoccupations. Hong has spent his career exploring similar characters, situations and themes with a familiar stock company of actors so that the movies feel as if they flow into one another like a river.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/21/2023
“Nothing kills the allure of an open marriage like your wife rolling into the club at one in the morning with Cary Grant. But I suppose some lessons have to be learned the hard way. With sozzled pratfalls and the kind of cheerful decadence at which early Hollywood excelled, we coast on airy, irreverent pleasures until the bottom drops out of this doomed romance.” – Crooked Marquee, 04/14/2023
“It’s especially disappointing because Dracula is deliciously played by Cage as a lip-smacking sequel to his career-defining turn in the 1988 cult classic Vampire’s Kiss. He’s a haughty, imperious Count with a dismissive disgust for us mere mortals. He’s also only in about 25 minutes of the movie, which strikes me as a staggering misallocation of resources.” – North Shore Movies, 04/14/2023
“A fun movie to watch. So much fun, it took until about halfway home for me to begin bristling at how neatly Goldhaber has stacked the deck. Our heroes somehow come up with a scheme in which they can blow this thing sky high without anybody getting hurt, nor any environmentally damaging spillage. The audience remains unchallenged throughout.” – North Shore Movies, 04/14/2023
“Funny in such a reserved, bone-dry fashion that half the audience will probably spend the movie wondering what the rest of us are laughing at. This is an expertly conducted symphony of passive-aggression, a portrait of a milieu where everyone fancies themselves too tolerant and enlightened to admit how exasperated they are with each other.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/13/2023
“For nearly thirty years, the Dardennes have been telling stories about characters struggling on the margins. When you’re desperate and poor, life takes place in the present tense, and so the films move from one immediate obstacle to another. Occasionally, there is a fleeting moment of grace; an unexpected act of tenderness. Or in this case, a song.” – North Shore Movies, 04/07/2023
“Enormously entertaining and maybe just a little bit evil, Ben Affleck’s Air is about how a humble $100 million corporation became a behemoth worth billions, a miracle of marketing the film treats as a triumph of the human spirit. This anatomy of a celebrity endorsement is an underdog sports movie without the sports. And without the underdogs.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/04/2023
“The story is a scorching, unwieldy, noir-tinted melodrama overflowing with operatic emotions and doomy fatalism. Journeyman Lewis Milestone doesn’t so much direct Robert Rossen’s script as he tries to keep up with it. In the hands of a great visual stylist (like Rossen himself) the movie could have been a masterpiece. As is, it’s still a corker.” – Crooked Marquee, 03/31/2023
“Wears its world-building with a refreshingly light touch, sending the spry cast on a semi-nonsensical trek through a whole host of half-explained medieval fantasy tropes, interrupted by massive, impersonal effects sequences that stop the film dead in its tracks. A cheaper, chintzier version of this movie might have been as much fun as these actors appear to be having.” – North Shore Movies, 03/31/2023
“This is some serious Marvin Berry shit, depicting artists like The Isley Brothers, Gladys Knight and Donna Summer as medium-talent rubes headed nowhere until this smooth-talking white boy sauntered into the studio and showed them how it’s done. Aside from being incredibly offensive to anybody who cares about this music, the movie is also terrible.” – North Shore Movies, 03/30/2023
SPLICED PERSONALITY 