“Valentine’s Day is the most unnecessarily stressful holiday that isn’t New Year’s Eve. Couples risk being crushed under colossal expectations to come up with the perfect date, while the rest of us need to find someplace where we won’t feel self-conscious about being alone. As is my catch-all solution for most of life’s problems, I find going to the movies helps.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/08/2023
“The dual Swintons remain isolated within separate frames, while Hogg’s deliberately uncanny cutting underscores the psychological gulf between them. The Eternal Daughter isn’t a horror movie, but it’s haunted. The gothic trappings aren’t supernatural so much as they’re externalizations of the characters’ regrets. This is a hotel where you bring your own ghosts.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/06/2023
“Like an even more explicitly religious revision of Signs with a former wrestler instead of alien invaders. Behind the camera, Shyamalan is precise, inventive and keeps a lot of the action offscreen to make your mind do the dirty work. He also still can’t write, which is a problem when you’re trying to parse as many big ideas as this picture keeps throwing around.” – North Shore Movies, 02/03/2023
“There’s no way to look at the groundbreaking career achievements of Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno or Sally Field and feel good about watching this slapdash sponsored content, a shrine to an increasingly weird Florida Man producing his own unseemly vanity project. Is this the best Hollywood can offer these women who have given the movies so much?” – North Shore Movies, 02/02/2023
“Chopra will be back in the neighborhood this Friday night for a mini-retrospective in celebration of her recently released memoir Lady Director, a blisteringly candid and compulsively readable tell-all from a trailblazer who isn’t afraid to name names. The book arrives during an overdue reconsideration of a career stifled by chauvinism and Hollywood politics.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/01/2023
“If this sounds like Fatal Attraction, that’s because the 1987 smash was basically a remake. And just as Lyne’s blockbuster became a release valve for the era’s unspoken AIDS paranoia, Misty captured its own cultural moment, evoking the eerie hangover that followed Free Love, shot the summer after the Manson family ended all that California dreamin’ on Cielo Drive.” – Crooked Marquee, 01/27/2023
“The movie is a mind-melting, 201-minute colossus of monotony that warps and distorts time inside the viewer’s headspace. It is a towering achievement in cinema. It’s also one of the last films I’d ever recommend to casual moviegoers, which is why the placement of Jeanne Dielman at the top of the BFI list strikes me as such a problematic provocation.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/26/2023
My third dispatch from the 2023 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of William Oldroyd’s Eileen, Chloe Domont’s Fair Play, Alice Englert’s Bad Behaviour and Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance.
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“The film’s escalating escapades of sicko violence are punctuated by psychedelic drug freakouts and semi-pornographic dream orgies. It’s an awful lot, yet somehow still not quite enough. Thank goodness then, for our newly crowned scream queen Mia Goth, following up last year’s seismic performance in Pearl as an entirely different kind of chaos agent.” – North Shore Movies, 01/26/2023
“Looks and sounds so much like the kind of film you want it to be that if you’re willing to squint, you can let it slide. Maybe I Do may be little more than Nancy Meyers karaoke, but at least someone’s still trying to sing these songs. One hopes that if the nostalgia for this sort of picture continues, we might finally get one that’s actually good instead of just good enough.” – North Shore Movies, 01/26/2023
SPLICED PERSONALITY 