“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

”Full of oddball digressions and magic realist flights of fancy, the film has the loose, expansive nature of a neighborhood legend, like a rambling tall tale passed down and embellished from one generation to the next. Household Saints is a jewel from an era that was a treasure trove for American independent cinema, yet for the longest time you couldn’t see it anywhere.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/03/2024

”Not every first-time filmmaker comes out of the gate with a stone cold masterpiece, but a surprising number have come pretty close. Debut features arrive in all shapes and sizes, as we can see from a wonderfully extensive retrospective running at the Coolidge Corner Theatre over the next few months in celebration of the venue’s upcoming expansion.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 12/01/2023

“America’s loss of innocence writ large – and I mean really large – The Deer Hunter is a work of such self-conscious, chest-thumping grandiosity that it’s easy to see why the film has fallen out of favor in some circles. Yet there’s something elemental about the movie’s boys’ adventure machismo, a primal force that overpowers Cimino’s more cartoonish flourishes.” – Crooked Marquee, 11/17/2023