“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The three films are dense with ideas, offering a complexity of thought that stands in sad contrast to what passes for discourse today. You can’t fit Baldwin’s worldview into a tweet. He’s funny and urbane, with no time for traditional talking points or the kind of self-congratulation you get from folks who make a big deal out of letting you know they have good politics.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/23/2023

“My favorite part of this past Sunday’s ceremony was when Creed III stars Michael B. Jordan and Jonathan Majors gave out the award for Best Cinematography, turning the presentation into a delightful two-minute film school class before the nominees were read. It was fun to watch, and you learned a little something about how movies are made.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/16/2023

“I know that there’s dialogue in Beau Travail, but I’ll be damned if I can ever remember any. Denis tells the story almost entirely through physicality and movement. Throbbing with barely-repressed homoeroticism, the movie is a mass of engorged muscles and entwined limbs; desire rerouted through conformity and cruelty in the rhythm of the night.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/06/2023