“There’s no frame around the proceedings, nor any character introductions for the sake of the audience. We’re thrown into the action via a herky-jerky, 16mm handheld camera bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter around the performers in black-and-white, following their rapid mood swings from back-slapping bonhomie to chillingly sudden spurts of hostility.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/01/2022

“Given the increasingly likely possibility that it will not have another, one can’t really be blamed for wanting to celebrate America’s 246th birthday by getting lost. Luckily it’s a big country, and the Brattle Theatre has a dozen movies screening over the next ten days that rack up more interstate mileage than an entire season of Diners, Drive-Ins And Dives.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/30/2022

“It’s the first non-musical directed by Garland’s then-beau and future husband Vincente Minnelli, who coordinates the teeming Times Square and bustling subway stations like choruses. His camera captures such a pulsating sense of big city life the film is commonly mistaken as being filmed on location, when in actuality it was all shot on the MGM lot.“ – Crooked Marquee, 06/17/2022

“It’s 51 minutes into Something Wild when Ray Liotta makes his entrance and knocks the entire film off its axis. This genial, sexy comedy has suddenly become incredibly scary, and the following hour’s nerve-racking, seasick sensations are almost entirely attributable to this up-and-coming young actor with the too-loud laugh and terrifying eyes.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/14/2022

“One of the filmmaker’s more pitiless efforts, it’s a brutal examination of transactional relationships that feels eerily prophetic today, as if he’d already seen the dire ends to which the 1980s would bring us. Most of the movie takes place in malls, hotels and other commercial settings, split into three chapters following three characters at various stages of selling out.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/10/2022

“He kept a cartoonist’s sensibility in his appreciation for exaggerated lines and curves, and as the later films grew more explicitly artificial, they came to look more and more like his drawings come to life. Fellini was fond of blaring music while shooting scenes, which is why characters always appear to be slightly swaying to the wistful waltzes of Nino Rota’s scores.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/09/2022

“Cronenberg has confessed that his 1979 gyno-nightmare was drawn from his own experiences in a bitter custody battle, the true-life traumas filtered through a heady mix of icky physiological anomalies and eruptions of entrails. It’s a rare peek at the private life of this intimidatingly intellectual filmmaker, whose work is always personal but seldom autobiographical.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/03/2022

“Vince Majestyk is a classic Elmore Leonard protagonist in the tradition of Chili Palmer or Raylan Givens, an unflappable fellow completely at ease in his own skin, matter-of-factly reacting to violent threats in ways that reduce the bad guys issuing them to furious, sputtering wrecks. These are the coolest characters because they don’t ever try to be cool.” – Crooked Marquee, 05/27/2022

“Ritchie keeps a polite distance from the novel’s more notorious shenanigans. Football is a backdrop instead of the film’s focus, and you’ve never seen a SuperBowl treated so nonchalantly. Fans of the book found the adaptation treasonous, but others were beguiled by the offbeat rhythms and an airy, almost European approach to such a distinctly American game.” – Crooked Marquee, 05/13/2022

“A masterpiece of alienation returns in all its ragged, unseemly glory. The movie means to be Hopper’s reckoning with the legacy his generation has left for their children, and as far as metaphors go, the original Easy Rider wiping out a bus full of kids while he was wasted isn’t exactly a subtle one. But then, we never admired Dennis Hopper for his understatement.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/11/2022