“Neill was not a needy performer, and appeared perfectly content to let the women in his pictures take center stage. You can trace this tendency all the way back to one of his very first films. In Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 My Brilliant Career, Neill plays a strikingly handsome, lovelorn son of privilege who is bowled over by Judy Davis’ headstrong Sybylla Melvyn.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/24/2026

“A fantastic fusion of form and content. It is incredibly embarrassing for a man to call himself The Lizard King, and it’s also pretty awesome. The overwrought grandiloquence of the music is why it totally rules, and, in keeping with his career-long aversion to understatement, Stone creates a beat-for-beat visual corollary. The movie feels like a Doors song.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/22/2026

“With his concave cheeks and haunted eyes, Harry Dean Stanton was nobody’s idea of a movie star. He looked like hard living personified; an iconoclast hanging out on the periphery of the New Hollywood revolution, lending his lonesome cowboy vibes to a remarkable array of landmark films. Just watching some of his movies makes the theater smell like cigarettes.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/07/2026

“A raunchy screwball comedy that improbably became the Walt Disney Company’s highest-grossing movie of 1986, Ruthless People is dirty but not smutty, naughty yet never nasty. From the bright, pop-art production design to the shadow-free lighting by future legend Jan de Bont, it looks and feels like a film where you know nobody is ever really going to get hurt.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/26/2026

“I suppose we should start this series at the beginning. Perhaps fittingly, my career as a professional film critic began with Clint Eastwood. His largely-forgotten 1999 programmer True Crime was the first movie I reviewed for Philadelphia Weekly. I was 24 years old, working as a cinema manager and writing terrible screenplays in my free time.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/22/2026

“Humphrey Bogart was still two years away from his first leading man role in The Maltese Falcon, but he’s already dominating the screen. You can see Cagney ceding scenes to Bogie, as if he were as delighted by him as we are. The third-billed Bogart is so electrifying you remember the character as being in more of the movie than he actually is.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/19/2026

“Zemeckis’ sophomore effort was (barely) released four months before Reagan’s election and foretold a cultural revolution. The broadly satirical farce follows a cadre of gleefully amoral salesmen and rip-off artists pushing junkers while trying to screw the competition even harder than they’re screwing their customers. He saw the ‘80s coming a mile away.” – Crooked Marquee, 05/29/2026

“The ancient Greeks went to the theater for catharsis, to purge their fears in an act of communal cleansing. Such is the goal of Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair, an early summer festival of bad vibes that started five years ago at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles. Since then, the series has expanded to include nearly 100 theaters in 73 cities.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/28/2026

“Their first tryst became legendary in a decade renowned for erotic thrillers. It was rare even then for an American film to make sex look like this much fun. Unlike the usual strenuous aerobics, this one’s playful and funny. The lovers are hot, bothered and clumsily half-clothed. What Barkin does for men’s button-down shirts in this movie cannot be overstated.” – Crooked Marquee, 05/15/2026