“Robertson’s book is a gentlemanly tour of late-‘70s Southern California decadence, full of eyebrow-raising anecdotes and delicious name drops. But mostly it’s a love story about two best friends who not-so-secretly want to be each other. Come for the coke binges and gorgeous gals, stay for the lengthy digressions about Sam Fuller and the Staple Singers.” – Crooked Marquee, 12/01/2025
“He writes like he’s jabbing a finger in your chest while he’s telling you a story. That he’s somehow alive, sober and still making films at the age of 73 is a shock to everyone, especially Ferrara himself. Scene is partially a confession, something of an amends and it reads like a late night rant. What else would you expect from a memoir by Abel Ferrara?” – Crooked Marquee, 11/03/2025
“The 89-year-old Allen’s debut novel is tangy and bitter, slipping an amusingly corrosive one-liner into just about every paragraph. The man is still a joke machine, and he’s at his funniest when he lets his contempt hang out like it does here, taking potshots at both his loser protagonist and the Manhattan culture vultures who might be right to consider him beneath them.” – North Shore Movies, 10/20/2025
“These are the kinds of pictures where if the characters stop at a store, the shopkeeper is going to have a whole story of his own going on. They’re generous films, warm in a way that can’t be faked. The sets are cluttered like people actually live there, the mismatched thrift shop fashions messy the way life is. Demme was a rare filmmaker who actually seemed to like people.” – Crooked Marquee, 08/19/2025
“Critic and curator Michael Koresky’s fantastic new book surveys 25 years of subversive subtext roiling and rumbling under the Technicolor surfaces of Hollywood films that followed the letter of the Hays Code but not the spirit. It’s a rollicking work of scholarship willing to take a close, thoughtful look at pictures deemed ‘problematic’ by today’s standards.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/12/2025
“This unproduced screenplay penned by Brian De Palma in the 1990s is the blueprint for a most eccentric thriller. It’s a heady, tongue-in-cheek swirl of the director’s pet preoccupations, with the villain’s plan modeled on the opera house climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much. De Palma is literally weaponizing his love of Hitchcock here.” – North Shore Movies, 05/29/2025
“Like a lot of memoirs, Desperately Seeking Something is a largely conciliatory affair, which might be a disappointment to those looking for dish about the outsized personalities she’s worked with over the years. Seidelman’s even generous to a screenwriter she says gave her a case of crabs, going on to praise his script for Making Mr. Right in the same paragraph.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/17/2024
“Making a strong case for Chaplin as the first victim of the Red Scare, Scott Eyman’s excellent new book Charlie Chaplin Vs. America: When Art, Sex And Politics Collided chronicles the Kafkaesque quagmire of grandstanding government officials, sleazy tabloid journalists and fickle public opinion that sent the Little Tramp packing for Switzerland. It’ll get your blood up.” – Crooked Marquee, 11/01/2023
“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
“Tarantino has a voracious appetite for cinema but it is by no means boundless, existing within sharply circumscribed parameters of genre and exploitation movies. His disdain for anything that could be perceived as highfalutin’ or hoity-toity is like living on a diet entirely of cheeseburgers, leaving the reader wishing that Quentin might try a salad once in a while.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/16/2022
SPLICED PERSONALITY 