”A warm, spring breeze of a movie, They All Laughed was writer-director Peter Bogdanovich’s personal favorite of his films. Most days it’s mine, too. The 1981 rom-com is a gossamer confection flush with the lightheaded feeling of first falling in love. It feels casually enchanted, with a melancholy undertow that can’t help but be intensified by the true-life tragedy that followed.” – Crooked Marquee, 04/19/2024

”In the films of John Cassavetes, love is madness. It’s noisy, disruptive and it breaks stuff. Minnie And Moskowitz is as close as the director ever came to shooting a straight love story… if anything in this cockeyed fairy tale can be described as straight, given all the punching and hollering and pounding on doors one comes to expect in Cassavetes country.” – Crooked Marquee, 03/29/2024

“In synopsis, it probably doesn’t sound like much: a few weeks in the lives of a Taiwanese family after their grandma gets sick. Yet this is one of those movies so emotionally expansive that you feel like it might contain the whole of human experience. Yi Yi begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral, heartbreakingly attuned to the cycles and seasons of life.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/27/2024

“Lords was one of many movies I never actually saw as a kid, but had vividly envisioned a fantasy film in my head based on the VHS box art. The cover shot of Winkler and Stallone in tough guy leather jackets had me imagining an origin story for Fonzie in which he fought in a street gang alongside a young Rocky Balboa. How could any real movie compete with that?” – Crooked Marquee, 03/08/2024

“If you ask me, Margot Robbie delivered one of 2023’s most skillful turns as Barbie’s titular toy, but the Academy has always shied away from honoring comedic performances in leading roles. The real bias here is a slant toward self-seriousness. Comic timing as deft as Robbie’s stands no chance against Carey Mulligan dying of cancer with a mid-Atlantic accent.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/07/2024

”Coolidge restages and reexamines the night when, as a 16-year-old boarding school student in 1962, she was raped by an acquaintance while visiting New York. As we watch the movie being made, we’re also witnessing an artist taking back control of an evening during which it was violently wrested away from her, finding catharsis in the act of creation.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/07/2024

“A fun example of how cool and influential a film can be without being particularly good. The existential moonshiner melodrama stuck around for so many years at the bottom of double bills, distributors took to calling it ‘the Gone With The Wind of drive-ins.’ Thunder Road was a counterculture B-picture before anyone really knew what those were yet.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/23/2024

”Sayles and Springsteen’s sensibilities are so simpatico it’s impossible to imagine the movie without his music. Both artists share a complex understanding of the American experience in all its maddening contradictions, plus enormous affinities for regular folks whose lives are full and have stories worth telling, even as their dreams remain stubbornly out of reach.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/16/2024

”A non-stop barrage of creepy-crawly bugs and bats and eyeball soup and chilled monkey brains, unleashed with a naughty child’s delight in the inappropriate. Despite the precision of the filmmaking, one never gets a sense that Lucas and Spielberg are entirely in control of their material. The film feels more reckless than Raiders. Dangerous, even. Anything goes.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/07/2024

”With the help of Mean Streets cinematographer Kent Wakeford and editor Marcia Lucas, Alice has a roving, wobbly visual technique, the unsettled camera evoking the characters’ uncertain living situations. It’s more volatile than you’d expect from a story like this, scenes abruptly exploding into laughter or tears as befitting an exhausted mom’s mood swings.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/02/2024