“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

“I think Dunaway’s actually pretty great in Mommie Dearest, going for broke with a baroquely stylized turn a galaxy away from the low-key naturalism so fashionable in boring biopics intending to bring icons down to earth. She’s not just playing Joan Crawford, she’s playing a larger-than-life idea of Crawford as imagined by someone who grew up seeing her on a giant screen.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/06/2022

“The films of David Lynch vibrate on a frequency of intense dread, one that’s often counterbalanced by equally intense expressions of innocence, purity and love that would seem laughably corny if they weren’t so hard-won. Inland Empire is strictly the scary stuff, his most heartless, hopeless movie. And perhaps tellingly, to date his last.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/04/2022

“The half-kidding nature of Carrie’s opening is emblematic of De Palma’s overripe, sensuous sensibility, a naughty boy’s luscious leering with just enough self-awareness to have his cake and eat it, too. He’s smart about being sleazy, always up for using gratuitous nudity as commentary on female objectification, while at the same time reveling in tawdry delights.” – Crooked Marquee, 04/22/2022