“Often called the Thinking Man’s Sex Symbol, Vitti was less ‘va-va-voom’ in her appeal than Italian starlets of the era like Loren or Magnani. High cheekbones and a patrician air made her the perfect frontwoman for Antonioni’s adrift elite: absurdly wealthy, spiritually bankrupt wanderers who have everything and are slow to realize how little that really is.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/01/2022

“Paying little lip service to genre conventions, Mann’s electrifying, experimental cyber-thriller is an almost abstract symphony of sound and color smeared across the screen in crackling, corrupted digital cinematography meant to mirror the twitchy surveillance state in which its stealthy characters operate. Blackhat is like a Stan Brakhage movie with gunfights.” – Crooked Marquee, 03/01/2022

“There’s a touchingly autumnal sense of diminishment in El Dorado, explicitly addressing infirmity and old age in ways unthinkable for these stars just a few years prior. These characters are constantly coming up short. The movie ends not with our heroes riding off into the sunset, but hobbling on crutches, laughing and limping their way into legend.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/18/2022

“Writer-director Louis Malle’s semi-autobiographical 1971 masterpiece looks affectionately askance at a waning aristocracy and a way of life without consequences as a young man comes of age. It’s an enormously entertaining picture, presumably the gentlest and most endearing movie ever made about a boy who has sex with his mother.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/04/2022

“I suppose you could stream it. But you know how some movies need to be seen on a big screen? The Conversation needs to be heard in an auditorium on the kind of equipment you don’t have at home. It’s an intricately constructed aural experience about the act of listening, and how sometimes our perceptions of sounds are shaped by what we want to hear.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/02/2022

“The early films presented in the HFA series betray little of the bitter gorehound Mou would become. 1969’s I Didn’t Dare Tell You and 1970’s The End Of The Track are gentle, humanist portraits of young people struggling to get by in an uneasy time of economic inequality, reminiscent of the Italian neorealists in their depiction of everyday life.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/26/2022

“Wilder’s most bracingly unlikeable film since his muckraking 1951 masterpiece Ace in the Hole, which died a similar box office death. It’s a curiously powerful picture, pushing up against the era’s mores and sexual politics in productively uncomfortable ways. You get the sense that the director is not always in control of his material, and that’s why the movie leaves a mark.” – Crooked Marquee, 01/21/2022

“Youssef Chahine’s 1958 masterpiece comes to an ugly end with a train car grinding to a halt in front of a bloody altercation, the forces of forward progress literally stopped in their tracks by a culture’s psychosexual dysfunction. There’s nothing quaint or reassuring about Cairo Station. In fact, what might be most disturbing is that it hasn’t aged a day.” – Crooked Marquee, 01/07/2022

“Due to the pandemic, the retrospective ran last December at the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s Virtual Screening Room before being released as a Criterion Collection box set. But the good folks at the Brattle have brought it back to the big screen where it belongs, kicking off on Christmas Day with a 35mm print of Wong’s masterpiece, In The Mood For Love.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/23/2021

“You have to get dinged around a bit by life before you can make a movie like Fat City, a film that dwells in disappointment without making a big deal about it. The picture drifts in and out of the characters’ days with little in the way of momentum and would probably feel as purposeless as these people’s lives, were it not for Huston’s amiable eye.” – Crooked Marquee, 12/17/2021