“With the synth-pulse soundtrack and vast desert spaces, Laxe is working in the mystic tradition of filmmakers like Herzog and Tarkovsky, but with the white-knuckle ruthlessness of an action craftsman. A friend left the film saying he wanted to drown the director in a puddle of radiator fluid. I don’t share his reaction, but I understand it. The movie works you over.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 03/08/2026

“A hellzapoppin’ cacophony of silly ideas and mad movie love, overhauling James Whale’s 1935 classic into a funhouse feminist manifesto. The exclamation point in the title is emblematic of Gyllenhaal’s try-hard approach, which doesn’t always land on the right side of cringe and could easily be exhausting if you’re in the wrong mood. I was in the right mood.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/05/2026

“Barclay’s documentary is ultimately a story of religion and the powerful hold it can have on those brought up in it; when Jesus said to love everybody, but the church says the way you love them is a sin. Music was Preston’s escape from his earthly torments, his way of reaching the divine. But that faith is also what drove his self-destruction.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 03/03/2026

“An exhausted excuse for a sequel, lacking a single new idea or any discernable reason for being. Taking place in a drab, suburban wasteland where everyone is tediously obsessed with a few murders that happened 30 years ago, the Scream movies have long ago shifted from an arch commentary on slasher movie tropes to an endless recycling of the same.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/28/2026

“It’s easy to guess which parts of the movie Hadi personally remembers from growing up in Iraq. That verisimilitude is the film’s strongest asset. Yet it’s just as easy to guess which screenplay conceits the director gleaned from studying film at NYU, and what story points came from the Sundance Institute Labs. Basically, the movie is too real to be this phony.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/26/2026

“Words like ‘corny’ and ‘cringe’ never occurred to Elvis Presley, a man incapable of irony. That’s why he was The King. Baz Luhrmann understands this, bless his rhinestone-encrusted heart. The gaudy Australian maximalist has spent the past few years trying to find bigger and louder ways to convey the Earth-shaking awesomeness of the Elvis experience.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/21/2026

“Some actors vamp better than others. Margaret Qualley happens to be great at it, sashaying through the picture as a one-note femme fatale. She’s laying it on too thick, but you’re happy to see someone doing something. The only time Ford’s camera comes to life is when he’s trying to fit her seemingly endless legs into the widescreen frame.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/19/2026

“The film takes place in a nebulous emotional space after an amicable divorce, when a family is still figuring out how they’re going to move forward. Anna works with tapestries upon which she presses pieces of iron, making patterns out of the impressions they leave behind. That’s sort of what the movie is about: the faded residue of a relationship that’s over.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/18/2026

“You don’t get the sense that anything is being prioritized in a Gore Verbinski film, there’s just stuff everywhere. I wasn’t surprised to learn this script was originally written as anthology film, then retrofitted into a feature. None of the flashbacks pay off. It’s like binge-watching a whole season of Black Mirror in the middle of a movie.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/15/2026

“A collection of warmed over cops-and-robbers cliches that were already pretty hoary when Michael Mann threaded them together three decades ago in Heat, absent the doomy grandeur that elevates Mann’s routine policer material into poetry. Plodding and workmanlike, Crime 101 is as prosaic a picture as I’ve seen in ages.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/12/2026