“Given what we’ve learned about Nate Parker’s past and his treatment of women, what are we supposed to make of he and Celestin creating an entirely fictional scene in which Parker’s onscreen wife gets raped just so he can spend the rest of the movie nobly avenging her assault? C’mon, you don’t see Mel Gibson trying to play Oskar Schindler.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/12/2016
“In my experience, seeing a film you love in 70mm is akin to discovering it anew. So crisp and beautiful was the image in The Hateful Eight that I found it difficult to sit through other current movies with their sludgy digital distortions for weeks afterwards. It was like listening to a compressed MP3 on earbuds after attending a symphony orchestra.” – Boston Reel, 09/15/2016
“Point Blank is about as close as a mainstream narrative movie can get to not having a present tense. Elliptical and overlapping, Walker’s disconnected memories flicker across the picture and soundtrack, turning scenes into jigsaw puzzles for the audience to assemble as we go along. It’s like if Alain Resnais directed The Terminator.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 08/10/2016
“Robert Aldrich’s Hustle is a long, boozy slouch towards something like redemption, with Reynolds flashing faint flickers of disgust as he warily tries to navigate his way through a fallen world of venality and corruption. Old Hollywood movies are constantly blaring on television, as if taunting him with their glamorous tales of uncomplicated heroism.” – Boston Reel, 07/15/2016
“Writer-director Ryan Coogler remembers. Balboa’s back with the hat, the leather jacket and the bouncy ball, mumbling malapropisms to anyone within earshot. Rocky has endured for so long in the hearts of moviegoers because he’s a character completely lacking in guile, a fighter without a mean bone in his body.” – The Muriel Awards, 02/20/2016
“Middle finger aloft, De Palma cast the daughter (Melanie Griffith) of one of Hitchcock’s iconic blondes as a porn star and has the villain penetrating helpless women with a massive power drill held at crotch-level as the most unsubtle phallic symbol in the history of cinema. If you can get on its perverse wavelength the film is screamingly funny.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 01/05/2016
“GoodFellas is one of the great sustained acts of virtuosity in American cinema, the artistry so in-your-face and swaggering that even a fifteen-year-old kid who only knew what he was talking about half the time could see the man behind the curtain working the levers, and that made it all the more thrilling. I finally understood what it meant for a movie to be directed.” – Movie Mezzanine, 09/21/2015
“The white suit, that lighted dance floor, the strut — so many tropes have become part of our shared pop iconography that a lot folks tend to just assume they’ve seen the movie at some point, if only through cultural osmosis. Here’s a good way to tell for sure: If you’re laughing derisively about it, you haven’t watched Saturday Night Fever recently.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 09/21/2015
“A compromised work about how compromise eats the soul, it has a boozy, slouchy grandeur that troubles your dreams for weeks after the closing credits roll. This is Peckinpah’s final word on a genre he helped to define, and what a hopeless, despairing word that is. It’s the greatest movie you almost never got a chance to see.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 08/10/2015
“There was no subject nor any genre that he couldn’t somehow turn into a Robert Altman movie. Other filmmakers tell stories, Altman created ecosystems. He built minutely detailed worlds, mostly governed by sadness and systemic corruption, and then sent his iconoclastic heroes ping-ponging off the walls of their limitations, often failing spectacularly” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 07/30/2015
