“The affectations and allusions are entirely deliberate. Leone, his film critic pal Dario Argento and a hotshot young director named Bernardo Bertolucci spent months binging every ancient Hollywood oater they could find while coming up with the story, stealing scenes and scenarios willy-nilly. Once Upon A Time In The West isn’t just any old Western, it’s all of them.” – Crooked Marquee, 05/26/2023
Category Archives: Features
TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME OFF THE REEL AT THE SOMERVILLE
“The afterparty is the brainchild of Identical Cousins, who have held similar Peaks shindigs in the past. They’re calling the Crystal Ballroom event ‘a mini-festival of fan art, an immersive space where we inhabit the dream together. We want folks to hear the wind, pass through the woods and slip through the curtains backstage to another dimension.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/26/2023
A FORD GALAXIE FAR, FAR AWAY: GEORGE LUCAS’ AMERICAN GRAFFITI
“The sixties haven’t made it out to these small towns yet, where kids still listen to doo-wop and drink milkshakes in their muscle cars while cruising the downtown strip. Lucas’s sophomore effort is a wistful picture about the twilight of American innocence, set on the precipice of the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam. It’s the last night of summer, in more ways than one.” – Crooked Marquee, 05/12/2023
PILLOW STALK: EROTIC THRILLERS AFTER MIDNITE AT THE COOLIDGE
“Scary movies allow us safe spaces where we can work out our anxieties. And there were few things scarier or more anxiety-inducing than sex during the AIDS crisis. Yet even separated by decades from this subtext, these movies still thrill because they understood that desire can (and sometimes should) feel dangerous and dirty. That’s the fun part.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/11/2023
RAGING BULL RETURNS
“One of the great American films, not for what it tells us about LaMotta, but for what it tells us about ourselves. Scorsese’s masterpiece is a searingly personal exploration of jealousy and self-loathing, seen (sometimes literally) through the eyes of a man who considers himself so unworthy of love that he cannot stop hurting those who care about him most.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/05/2023
RACHEL, RACHEL: NEWMAN’S OWN LOVE LETTER
“It’s a low-key character study tuned to Woodward’s exquisite performance, one of the decade’s finest. Rachel, Rachel features so many close-ups, a friend of Newman’s joked that watching the movie was like looking through his wallet photos. But you can hardly blame the happy husband, as her face registers so vividly the character’s secrets and lusty longings.” – Crooked Marquee, 04/21/2023
STILL LIFE WITH HONG SANGSOO AT THE HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE
“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
SINGLE LIVES, TWIN BEDS: MERRILY WE GO TO HELL
“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
LOVE LIES BLEEDING: THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS
“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
MICHELLE YEOH ALL AT ONCE: YES, MADAM!

“Thirty-eight years before winning the Academy Award for Best Actress, Michelle Yeoh started her career as a leading lady by slamming a heavy book of Michelangelo paintings shut on a trench-coated flasher’s junk in this nutty 1985 Hong Kong thriller. Yes, Madam! is a rather ridiculous film. But in it, you can see a superstar being born.” – Crooked Marquee, 03/24/2023