“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

“Maybe the best way to describe Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is that it feels like a movie made by a 14-year-old. I mean this as a compliment. This is a dreamy and occasionally foolish film made with the heedless ardor of first love, a movie of frightening, sticky desires and irrational anger. It’s also the kind of thing that makes literary purists want to pull their hair out.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/11/2026

“I’ll cop to giggling in appreciation more than once at the threadbare exuberance of Luc Besson’s often risible craptacular, which has been thrown together with no particular interest in Bram Stoker’s oft-told story, but a mad love of making images. Especially silly ones. It’s Besson’s attempt to do cinema du look on a discount budget. Let’s just say the seams show.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/08/2026

“The thing about pop crazes is that they’re ephemeral. But the entertainment industry is designed to drag them out until there’s no more money or audience goodwill left to be plundered. The Moment is aptly titled because such things are fleeting, and we’re watching an artist try to figure out in real time how much of herself should be for sale.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/06/2026

“The protagonist is played by first-time actor Ubeimar Rios. He’s a fascinating physical specimen who appears to have been put together out of mismatched parts, with arms too short for his body and a mouth too big for his face. Yet however awkward and off-putting, Rios imbues him with a shabby nobility. We believe that Oscar wasn’t always like this.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/06/2026

“An unstructured montage of the First Lady’s entrances and exits, it’s endless scenes of a woman with no discernible personality walking in and out of rooms, occasionally accompanied by a voice-over of empty, ChatGPT-sounding banalities delivered in an affectless monotone. Melania shouldn’t even be called a documentary. It’s just footage.” – North Shore Movies, 01/31/2026

“A Private Life isn’t the kind of movie that spawns sequels, but I wouldn’t mind watching these aging exes solve a few more mysteries together. Auteuil has a softness that cushions Foster’s pointy features and flinty line deliveries. These two feel familiar in ways we instantly believe. It’s awfully sweet watching a couple of sixty-somethings get hot for each other again.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/29/2026

“This bummed me out. If you’re from Boston, you probably have an outsized emotional investment in these guys, and it’s sad that there’s no ambition to the picture, no aspiration to excellence. Disposable even by the standards of Netflix movies, it diminishes them and their partnership to appear in something like this. It’s Matt and Ben’s Righteous Kill.” – North Shore Movies, 01/16/2026

“Adapted from Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir, the film is a fragmented flood of images and sensations putting us in the anguished headspace of its protagonist. Stewart asks a lot of the viewer, leaving us to stitch together story threads through flashes of a sometimes unreliable memory. We don’t see scenes so much as slivers and shards of a shattered life.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/15/2026