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

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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

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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

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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

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JAMES BALDWIN ABROAD


“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

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OSCARS 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

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CLAIRE DENIS: CINÉMA COURAGEUX AT THE COOLIDGE

“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

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LOCKS OF LOVE: ALAN RUDOLPH’S REMEMBER MY NAME


“What a pair Geraldine Chaplin and Anthony Perkins make together! They’re all sinewy, awkward angles and antsy energy. It doesn’t take too long for these two to get back up to their old tricks, at which point Remember My Name becomes an even more enticingly oblique experience. We learn everything about this couple, and also nothing.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/24/2023

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BAD ROMANCE WEEK: ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MARNIE


“Fueled by a filmmaker’s unhealthy obsession with his muse, Hitchcock’s messiest and most divisive movie is a lush spectacle of deliberate artifice engorged with icky sexual politics and retrograde fantasies. Marnie is a sinister, unpleasant picture, yet you can’t stop thinking about it. When the movie’s over you want to take a shower, and then talk about it some more.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/10/2023

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UNSOLICITED ADVICE ABOUT WHAT TO GO SEE ON VALENTINE’S DAY


“Valentine’s Day is the most unnecessarily stressful holiday that isn’t New Year’s Eve. Couples risk being crushed under colossal expectations to come up with the perfect date, while the rest of us need to find someplace where we won’t feel self-conscious about being alone. As is my catch-all solution for most of life’s problems, I find going to the movies helps.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/08/2023

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