“A peculiar and deeply personal tale of trauma marketed via McDonald’s Happy Meals. The bat, the cat and the penguin now take their places at the MFA alongside Gummo, Welcome To The Dollhouse and Being John Malkovich. And I’ll tell you, the movie feels a heck of a lot more comfortable in such company than it ever did at shopping mall multiplexes.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 12/19/2018

“Paramount took the costly and fairly unprecedented step of re-releasing it with an overhauled promotional campaign, to little avail. Yet it’s somehow fitting that Wonder Boys managed to flop twice, as the movie is practically a valentine to failure. This is a warmly humane and often side-splittingly funny exploration of underperforming against expectations.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/27/2018

“Of course she is an exasperating woman who makes terrible choices. Loden isn’t asking that you admire the character or applaud her decisions. Wanda just wants you to acknowledge that she exists. Spend a little time in this person’s company and maybe even leave the theater with a feeling for what she’s going through. That’s what art’s for.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/25/2018

“Rourke gives his funniest, most endearing performance as a raggedly princely drunkard wooing Dunaway’s washed-up, boozy grande dame. Müller’s cinematography imparts a grungy beauty to this Skid Row lit by sputtering neon and half-burnt-out strings of Christmas lights. I daresay there’s never been anyone better at photographing peeling paint.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 09/04/2018

“Life after the final bell is the subject of Rod Serling’s screenplay. Anthony Quinn’s performance is as oversized as his fists yet impossible not to adore, with Mickey Rooney’s weary cornerman seeing the inevitable, heartbreaking ending coming even before we do. By then the cloud of shame emanating from Gleason could block out the sun.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 08/30/2018

“Watching it again recently I found all of Coppola’s cornball flourishes to be rather endearing, even generous. It’s a teen movie that doesn’t condescend to kids, but translates their tumultuous emotions onto a giant canvas in a larger-than-life Hollywood vernacular that went out of fashion at least twenty years before the picture was even made.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/31/2018

“This is one of Lee’s most dynamic pictures, so electric and overflowing with energy it’s damn near exhausting. There’s a reckless vitality to the filmmaking, as if Spike’s as surprised as we are that such a sordid tale would wind up being released by Disney over Independence Day weekend and knows he won’t be getting away with anything like this again.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/04/2018

“An extravagantly stylized pulp burlesque that is at once an objectively lousy picture and just about the coolest damn thing I’ve ever seen. The pompadours are the size of skyscrapers and every street is lined with neon signs reflecting in the gutters. It’s the kind of movie where two guys have a sword fight with sledgehammers, because it looks awesome.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 06/20/2018

“Abel Ferrara’s 1992 masterpiece is a howl of anguish from the gutter. It’s a movie of wall-to-wall depravity and profound spiritual longing, at once one of the dirtiest and most deeply religious pictures I’ve ever seen. It’s probably blasphemous but also agonizingly sincere, the work of genuinely tortured artists trying to make sense of a fallen world.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/03/2018

“Paris, Texas is an almost impossibly perfect title for a film that filters American western iconography through the distinctly European lenses of Wenders and his brilliant cinematographer Robby Müller. This boldly elemental picture is like The Searchers with busted neon highway signs, full of magisterial landscapes as craggy as the face of its star.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 04/05/2018