“Lords was one of many movies I never actually saw as a kid, but had vividly envisioned a fantasy film in my head based on the VHS box art. The cover shot of Winkler and Stallone in tough guy leather jackets had me imagining an origin story for Fonzie in which he fought in a street gang alongside a young Rocky Balboa. How could any real movie compete with that?” – Crooked Marquee, 03/08/2024

“If you ask me, Margot Robbie delivered one of 2023’s most skillful turns as Barbie’s titular toy, but the Academy has always shied away from honoring comedic performances in leading roles. The real bias here is a slant toward self-seriousness. Comic timing as deft as Robbie’s stands no chance against Carey Mulligan dying of cancer with a mid-Atlantic accent.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/07/2024

”Coolidge restages and reexamines the night when, as a 16-year-old boarding school student in 1962, she was raped by an acquaintance while visiting New York. As we watch the movie being made, we’re also witnessing an artist taking back control of an evening during which it was violently wrested away from her, finding catharsis in the act of creation.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/07/2024

“A fun example of how cool and influential a film can be without being particularly good. The existential moonshiner melodrama stuck around for so many years at the bottom of double bills, distributors took to calling it ‘the Gone With The Wind of drive-ins.’ Thunder Road was a counterculture B-picture before anyone really knew what those were yet.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/23/2024

”Sayles and Springsteen’s sensibilities are so simpatico it’s impossible to imagine the movie without his music. Both artists share a complex understanding of the American experience in all its maddening contradictions, plus enormous affinities for regular folks whose lives are full and have stories worth telling, even as their dreams remain stubbornly out of reach.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/16/2024

”A non-stop barrage of creepy-crawly bugs and bats and eyeball soup and chilled monkey brains, unleashed with a naughty child’s delight in the inappropriate. Despite the precision of the filmmaking, one never gets a sense that Lucas and Spielberg are entirely in control of their material. The film feels more reckless than Raiders. Dangerous, even. Anything goes.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/07/2024

”With the help of Mean Streets cinematographer Kent Wakeford and editor Marcia Lucas, Alice has a roving, wobbly visual technique, the unsettled camera evoking the characters’ uncertain living situations. It’s more volatile than you’d expect from a story like this, scenes abruptly exploding into laughter or tears as befitting an exhausted mom’s mood swings.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/02/2024

”Arthur was typically cast as a tightly-wound professional coming charmingly unglued by her male co-stars and the chaotic circumstances surrounding her. What made her heroines unique was that they never seemed diminished, even when falling to pieces. These weren’t shrews to be tamed, but rather independent women blossoming into their best selves.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/01/2024

”It can also be seen as the codification of Pacino’s movie star persona, the first time he started treating that magnificent head of hair as a co-headliner and when his squeaky Michael Corleone whisper got gruff. The ending of the film is the beginning of the broadly theatrical, ‘LOUD-quiet-LOUD’ monologues that became the actor’s signature, for better and worse.” – Crooked Marquee, 01/19/2024

”The role instead went to Walter Matthau, during that wonderful stretch of the 1970s when a man with a self-described ‘face like a catcher’s mitt’ could be a movie star. There aren’t many films in which you can imagine Matthau swapping places with Eastwood – though The Bridges Of Madison County would be a corker – but Charley Varrick is a surprisingly comfy fit.” – Crooked Marquee, 01/05/2024