“It took me a while to come around on Pete Davidson, but seeing Big Time Adolescence at Sundance last year really won me over. He’s got the zonked, wiseacre affectlessness of vintage Bill Murray but with a post-millennial fragility; cocky in a manner that comes off as deeply, touchingly insecure. He’s an underachiever for an anxious age.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/19/2020
“It pretends to be a political allegory but the shockingly shallow screenplay by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof never engages with these characters’ beliefs long enough for the jokes to land as anything besides empty signifiers. It feels like someone took an old action movie script from the ‘80s and peppered it with buzzwords they picked up on Reddit.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/12/2020
“Progress is on the march, in ways both great and small. Since this is a Kelly Reichardt picture the emphasis is on the small, telling a tiny story about forgotten people with the deceptive simplicity of a folk tale. But don’t be fooled by this movie’s modest demeanor. It’s a glimpse of America in the process of becoming itself, for better and worse.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/11/2020
Sat in with my buddy Blake Howard on his latest insane endeavor, a minute-by-minute dissection of Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 classic All The President’s Men. In this episode we discuss the greatness of Jack Warden, split diopter shots, cigarette ashes and that time I watched Robert Redford watch a Dick Cheney documentary. Follow the money. – All The President’s Minutes, 03/09/2020
“The screenplay is pretty boilerplate stuff. Think Hoosiers with Dennis Hopper as the head coach, or The Bad News Bears if Buttermaker’s alcoholism was supposed to be sad. But the thing about formulas is that they work, and it’s impossible not to get swept up in the familiar beats of a misfit coach turning around his losing team just in time for the playoffs.” – North Shore Movies, 03/08/2020
“It’s all exhausted Southie stereotypes and donkey Irish burlesques, most characters carrying on like that Casey Affleck Dunkin’ Donuts commercial from Saturday Night Live. The low point is probably a bar brawl during a Sox game while everybody’s singing ‘Sweet Caroline.’ This is the kind of Boston movie you’d expect from a couple of Lakers fans.” – North Shore Movies, 03/06/2020
“Reichardt movies are immersive experiences, inviting you to settle in and let your metabolism power down to their pace. These are films of loaded glances and pregnant pauses, where even the slightest gestures become seismic. The stories are told in the spaces between the dialogue. Everything’s happening when it seems like nothing’s going on.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/05/2020
“This 1982 romantic drama was independently bankrolled by a wealthy Louisiana family of mortuary owners and made with an all-black cast and crew, most of them working in their positions for the first time. It’s a vital artifact from a lost part of film history, a tantalizing glimpse of a nascent black independent cinema movement that almost was.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/03/2020
“Suffused with a twilight longing, the most moving moments for me are the film’s evening montages, whether it’s the sun going down to the sound of Jose Feliciano’s ‘California Dreamin’’ or the achingly lovely parade of neon signs clicking on at dusk as the Stones sing ‘Out Of Time.’ All good things will soon come to an end, probably sooner than you think.” – The Muriel Awards, 03/01/2020
“Balagov’s extraordinary second feature is about life amid the ruins. It’s a story about carrying on after the unimaginable, when things are supposed to go back to normal as if they ever really could. The production design externalizes these characters’ inner lives, the crumbling city and its shellshocked inhabitants bearing the scars of a five-year siege.” – WBUR’s The ARTery 02/27/2020
SPLICED PERSONALITY 