“It’s a war movie for people disgusted by war, fed up with battlefield myths about valor and noble sacrifice. It’s about cheating and breaking bullshit rules and killing the enemy in cold blood because you can and because you have to. It’s a movie where death is ugly and everywhere and only the meanest, most irredeemable sons of bitches survive, if they’re lucky.” – Crooked Marquee, 03/18/2022

“Travolta and Cage have made more bad films than most stars of their stature, but the lineup Judge put together contains one cultural phenomenon after another. Saturday Night Fever, Moonstruck, Grease, Valley Girl, Raising Arizona and Pulp Fiction have become part of our shared pop consciousness. They’re movies you feel like you’ve seen even if you haven’t.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/14/2022

“In a genre where women were subject to all sorts of abuse, she was a fox who fought back. But what made her even more fun to watch is how much she looked like she was enjoying it. With that crooked curl of her naughty smile, Pam Grier always seemed to be having an even better time than you were watching her. It’s why crushes on her are still so contagious.” – Crooked Marquee, 03/04/2022

“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