“‘It’s a good 20 hours of work,’ Lazzaro says. ‘Setting up the rigging, power, positioning the truck and building a projector booth from scratch. Then tearing it all down. It all has to be safe and low impact to the grounds.’ So why go to all this trouble when easier, albeit inferior digital cinema options are available? ‘We do the Lord’s work. That’s why.'” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/18/2017
“We’re now halfway through director David Lynch’s maddening, magnificent magnum opus, a work of such sweeping breadth and bonkers daring that mere hyperbole feels meager and insufficient. This is the most thrilling, confounding program to be seen on television since… well, since the original Twin Peaks first premiered on ABC back in 1990.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/12/2016
“It has always seemed to me that if Spike Lee had any idea how to solve the systemic problems and inherent conflicts of race and class then he wouldn’t have had to make a movie about them. What makes the film a masterpiece its depiction of a day during which everyone thinks they’re doing the right thing and everything still goes to hell anyway.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/03/2017
“This has never been a show for people who want answers or explanations. You’ve just gotta sit back and let the images and sounds wash over you. The two-hour season premiere somehow managed to feel both familiar and strange, putting friendly faces in frightening new contexts, at once sweetly nostalgic and starkly sinister. It’s a hell of a thing.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 05/22/2017
“There’s a way to read the cryptic supernatural elements as Laura’s imagination of an evil that’s at least easier to understand than her father’s abuse, but in typical Lynch fashion he leaves interpretations up to the audience. The movie’s doom-laden orgies and strobe-lit screams attain a hypnotic grandeur that’s pulverizing when seen on a giant screen.” – Metro, 04/13/2017
“Both pictures hinge upon their star’s rare ability to engage an audience while playing cards close to his vest, and the films are fraught with doppelgangers and doubles, characters and scenes designed to serve as distorted mirror images of one another. Cronenberg depicts violence as a virus, infecting the pastoral settings and perverting formerly idyllic interactions.” – Metro, 04/07/2017
“In this increasingly digitized culture it can be difficult for our over-mediated eyes to determine what’s ones and zeroes, until you see a film like Fitzcarraldo and experience once again the shock of the real. It’s granular detail on a massive scale, with images full of intricacies not even the most sophisticated F/X effects department could conjure.” – Metro, 03/24/2017
“A job for hire, The Departed is one of Scorsese’s least soulful movies yet perhaps his most conventionally entertaining. He jokes it’s the only one with a plot. Editor Thelma Schoonmaker paces the film like it’s strapped to a rocket. We’re already nineteen minutes in and have covered twenty years’ worth of backstory before the title card even drops.” – Metro, 03/17/2017
“But what makes the movie a masterpiece is the intensely visceral way in which Spielberg conveys these children feeling adult emotions for the first time. The film’s final image is notably not of E.T.’s departing spaceship, but rather a medium shot of Henry Thomas’ Elliott; the Lost Boy growing up and waving goodbye to Peter Pan.” – Metro, 03/09/2017
“The problem with our accelerated media culture is that we quickly run out of angles with which to feed the content maw, and attention spans aren’t what they used to be. These films get picked to the bone during the Bataan Death March to Oscar Night, and contrary takes are what get clicks, which is why you see bizarre headlines calling La La Land fascist.” – The Muriel Awards, 03/05/2017
