“The kind of movie you start watching from somewhere in the middle on late night television and find that it’s imprinted itself on you. There are scenes in God Told Me To so strange that I still can’t believe I saw them, and if you try and describe the final act to a friend they’ll think you’re pulling their leg. Yet the picture proceeds with a forlorn gravity that casts a lingering spell.” – Crooked Marquee, 08/21/2026

“O’Hara made being unreasonable hilarious, and you can see a lot of Moira’s DNA in her big-screen breakthrough performance as Delia Deetz, Winona Ryder’s self-involved stepmother in Beetlejuice. Arkin compares O’Hara’s turn to the Wicked Witch in The Wizard Of Oz, because ‘the entire movie hinges on how over-the-top committed her performance is.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/18/2026

“The movie is as loopy and unhinged as its heroine, keeping us on the back foot from an opening car crash set to screeching strings courtesy of the star’s soon-to-be ex-husband David Shire. The Bernard Hermann-esque score makes a menacing introduction for Dianne Cruise, our shape-shifting protagonist traveling up a river of memory.” – Crooked Marquee, 08/14/2026

“When I saw the movie 30 years ago it was a late-1960s period piece set in a vanished downtown art scene. Revisiting the film was like opening a Totally ‘90s time capsule, its recreation of a bygone Manhattan now evoking a heyday of independent filmmaking from three decades after the movie was set. Watching it was like looking at a double reflection.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 08/11/2026

“The funniest cameo is still Val Kilmer, doing his Doc Holliday accent in a Jim Morrison wig while trying to get the Sphinx-like Dylan to break. When I sat down with Kilmer in 2005 for the most bizarre interview of my career, he really lit up when I mentioned this film. I told him how many times I’d watched it, and he said, ‘That makes you, me and the editor.’” – Spliced Personality Substack, 08/03/2026

“Most of the dialogue is rancid, often riotously so. Stone tries to knock the earnest, do-gooder halo off the social issue drama by making his lead characters lowlifes. Half-Graham Greene, half-Hunter S. Thompson, Salvador isn’t particularly interested in the nuances of Central American politics. It’s more about the director’s ideal of a macho, alpha-male liberalism.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/31/2026

“McElwee’s screamingly funny Sherman’s March was his breakthrough, a would-be historical documentary hijacked by the floundering love life of its director. Some of these women come off as eccentric, others downright insane. Yet he remains enraptured by all of them, politely lingering in their orbits and putting off his project for as long as they’ll allow.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/28/2026

“Neill was not a needy performer, and appeared perfectly content to let the women in his pictures take center stage. You can trace this tendency all the way back to one of his very first films. In Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 My Brilliant Career, Neill plays a strikingly handsome, lovelorn son of privilege who is bowled over by Judy Davis’ headstrong Sybylla Melvyn.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/24/2026

“A fantastic fusion of form and content. It is incredibly embarrassing for a man to call himself The Lizard King, and it’s also pretty awesome. The overwrought grandiloquence of the music is why it totally rules, and, in keeping with his career-long aversion to understatement, Stone creates a beat-for-beat visual corollary. The movie feels like a Doors song.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/22/2026

“With his concave cheeks and haunted eyes, Harry Dean Stanton was nobody’s idea of a movie star. He looked like hard living personified; an iconoclast hanging out on the periphery of the New Hollywood revolution, lending his lonesome cowboy vibes to a remarkable array of landmark films. Just watching some of his movies makes the theater smell like cigarettes.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/07/2026