“Żuławski’s Possession is a singular cinematic experience and probably the greatest breakup movie ever made, in which all the roiling emotions are externalized and untethered from any recognizable reality. It’s the most unhinged thing I’ve ever seen, and that’s before she starts sneaking off to have graphic sex with a giant, slimy tentacle monster.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/11/2021

“Mitchum mastered a look of mild amusement at the machinations of the Western and noir plots that followed his characters around. He sometimes seemed like he’d already seen this movie before and was killing time until cocktail hour, unflappable in his commitment to effortlessness. The Rat Pack guys swaggered. Robert Mitchum sauntered.” – Crooked Marquee, 11/05/2021

“Earlier this summer, critic Gerry Peary was conducting a Facebook poll of the best American film noirs, asking colleagues for ranked ballots of their favorites. As I am apparently the only movie reviewer in the world who hates making lists, I was completely flummoxed by Professor Peary’s assignment and told him to just put Touch Of Evil down ten times.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/01/2021

“The Outlaw Josey Wales is the first of Eastwood’s directorial efforts to try and reconcile these two seemingly contradictory sides of its director’s personality: the snarling, reactionary avenger and the groovy, NorCal dude who digs foreign films and jazz. It’s a tension that animates all his most interesting work, and to this day remains unresolved.” – Crooked Marquee, 10/22/2021

“A monument to ruin, it’s one of those great, misshapen movies full of bizarre tonal shifts and strange directorial choices that don’t seem to make much sense in the moment but linger in your mind for months afterward. Pauline Kael called it ‘an unqualified disaster of the type that only talented people have.’ I think it might be something of a masterpiece.” – Crooked Marquee, 10/08/2021

“These four terrific pictures brought issues of race to the forefront of twisty, throwback crime stories. Classic noirs from the ‘40s and ‘50s reflected and amplified the anxieties of traumatized men returning to a changed America after WWII, whereas these ‘90s counterparts applied that sort of doomy, old-fashioned fatalism to structural social injustice.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 09/22/2021

“The film’s centerpiece sequence is one of the most boldly transgressive in modern cinema, a terrifying tightrope walk of abuse and illicit longings that famously sent viewers fleeing from their seats. Blue Velvet speaks to something primal about moviegoing itself: we’re all in that closet with Jeffrey. If we didn’t like to watch we wouldn’t be at the movies in the first place.” – Crooked Marquee, 09/17/2021

“It might be Scorsese’s most manic movie, disjunctively doubling back through dissolves so we’re seeing things from multiple angles at once. The camera flips on its side or upside down altogether, with Van Morrison’s wheezy, queasy ‘TB Sheets’ percolating over and over on the soundtrack, his wailing harmonica standing in for the ambulance’s siren.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 09/10/2021

“Few films are blessed with the sense of discovery captured in these ramshackle reels. Wild Style is a fanciful first draft of a cultural history play-acted by the same people who created the culture in the first place. It’s a winning bit of self-mythology by folks who were there on the ground floor, adorable in it’s amateurish ardor and endless optimism.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/22/2021

“The private June screenings provided opportunities for Hinkle and Moylan to gauge the comfort levels of audiences returning to the theater after a scary 15 months, while also stress-testing their new operating systems. But most importantly, they were ways to say thank you to a community that came through when the Brattle needed them most.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/30/2021