“Wallowing in a scuzzy underworld of nudie booths and porno shoots, the sleaziest major Hollywood release of 1986 is an ugly, urgent thriller made by a director with something to prove. What sets 52 Pick-Up apart from countless other tawdry thrillers of its era are the film’s ruthless efficiency and astonishing cruelty. This movie has a mean streak a mile wide.” – Crooked Marquee, 04/11/2025

“The leggy bombshell is like nothing like these tweedy academics have ever seen, and Hawks gets enormous comic mileage out of their awestruck reactions to finding themselves in the same room as Barbara Stanwyck. (Honestly, they hold it together better than I would have.) This is the only live-action remake of Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs anyone needed.“ – Crooked Marquee, 03/28/2025

“He looked how he looked: an unassuming, ordinary guy with an arsenal of grins, winks and chilling stares he could shade into infinite variations. His voice was higher and huskier than you expected, its cracks a key to his often aching vulnerability onscreen. Hackman excelled at portraying gruff men with volcanic tempers, yet few stars seemed so easily wounded.“ – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/27/2025

”With the possible exception of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, the most exciting film released in 1981 was about two men having dinner. A continents-spanning epic set almost entirely within a stuffy restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, it’s entirely sui generis, the craziest idea for a movie you’ve ever heard and the unlikeliest sleeper hit of all time.” – Crooked Marquee, 03/21/2025

“The commonwealth is ready for its closeup. 192 closeups, to be exact. This sprawling, compulsively watchable collage offers clips from nearly 200 movies and television shows shot in and around the Bay State, serving as a travelogue and a history lesson while showcasing the fine work of area production crews who keep the Massachusetts film industry thriving.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/06/2025

”Set in a fairytale Manhattan familiar from champagne comedies of the 1930s, it’s a gentle slapstick jumble of missed connections, mistaken assumptions and doors being slammed in people’s faces at fancy hotels. It’s the kind of movie where the private detective wears silly disguises because scenes like these are funnier if someone’s dressed like a rabbi.” – North Shore Movies, 02/28/2025

”We meet more than seventy characters on a long, hot summer night’s journey into day, catching them on the fly as they come together or part ways. It’s a movie that’s all climaxes, a dizzyingly romantic array of clinches and farewells that becomes a hypnotic abstraction of bodies clasping together and ripping themselves asunder. You watch it like fireworks.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/28/2025

“One of my favorite Oscar moments occurred during the 2002 ceremony when Robert Altman and David Lynch both lost the Academy Award for Best Director to Ron Howard for A Beautiful Mind. Lynch later recollected that when Howard’s name was announced, Altman had called him over, pulled him close and said, ‘It’s better this way, David.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/27/2025

”However hard To Live and Die in L.A. might try to look and sound like another gleaming, shitty ‘80s movie, it’s got the rotting, miserable soul of a 1970s masterpiece. The movie’s slick, music video affectations can’t conceal the fundamental scuzziness. All the golden sunsets and neon lights feel like a battered woman’s smudged makeup over a black eye.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/21/2025

”Look, I’m not saying that every middle school kid should be allowed to see Blue Velvet, but watching it at that age blew open a lot of doors in my mind about what art was and what movies could do. Lynch taught us how to see films and television as more than mere plot delivery devices and embrace the many moods and mysteries they’re capable of conjuring.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/07/2025