“An integral part of my childhood, The Blues Brothers taught me the foundations of American music, introducing me to Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and James Brown at a time when you’d never hear them on the radio. It also taught me that cops, Nazis and good old boys are to be mercilessly mocked and messed with. Especially when you’re on a mission from God.” – Crooked Marquee, 05/31/2024

“It’s the kind of movie that tends to haunt viewers with memories that linger for years after the credits roll. There’s simply no shaking this Lancaster performance. The star was famous for his smarts and athletic prowess, yet his best roles explore the self-delusion behind that swagger. He’s fearless here, a towering failure, and we can’t look away from his collapse.” – Crooked Marquee, 05/17/2024

”One of the director’s breeziest, most consistently delightful efforts. Until the final scenes sneak up on you. Cecilia is a surrogate for our sometimes troubling but inescapably romantic relationship with the movies. These silly fantasies might be no good for anybody, but life would be unbearable without them. As someone once said, the heart wants what it wants.” – Crooked Marquee, 04/26/2024

”We used to worry a lot about selling out back then. The coolest celebrities treated their popularity as an affliction, and the only thing worse than being famous was wanting to be. In an age when everyone’s thirsty for likes and follows, characters carrying on about integrity must sound like alien transmissions from a distant solar system that burned out centuries ago.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/23/2024

”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