“It’s a generational divide you don’t see addressed much in film and television, where typically older folks are presented as prigs who can’t handle the candor of rebellious youth. As an aging Gen Xer, I’m thrilled to see a movie about how these days it feels like the opposite is true, expressly calling out millennials for being annoying little prudes.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/02/2026

“Shot by the superb cinematographer Hélène Louvart, whose handheld poetry is key to the films of Alice Rohrwacher and Eliza Hittman, Romería is a little confounding at first, but never less than visually ravishing. Llúcia Garcia, who plays Marina, has one of those captivating faces that can hold the camera all day. She even looks great with bangs.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 07/02/2026

“You don’t see a lot of children’s cartoons throwing around jokes about Eadweard Muybridge and Georges Méliès. But much to my delight, Minions & Monsters is stuffed silly with clever references to the early days of cinema. I applaud director Pierre Coffin for packing this film with jokes that even his target audience’s grandparents are too young to get.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 07/01/2026

“Given the nationalistic tenor of the proceedings, it’s amusing that they cast the most English-looking actor I’ve ever seen as George Washington. William Franklyn-Miller even has the name of a cad in a Jane Austen novel, and from certain angles he’s a ringer for Helena Bonham Carter. He’s one bad tooth away from being a human scone.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/29/2026

“Resting on laurels and recycling old footage, it’s the film equivalent of a classic rock band releasing a greatest hits album and tacking on a few middling new tracks so that fans have to re-buy a bunch of songs we already own. You know Knoxville and the gang are out of gas when they can’t even make cameraman Lance Bangs throw up.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/26/2026

“Writer-director Fast isn’t a filmmaker overly concerned with making sure the audience understands everything that’s going on. Emily keeps losing track of time, with days on end disappearing in the attic. The film itself feels like it’s disassociating alongside her, scenes bleeding into each other in a sound bath of droning, fuzzy guitar feedback.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/25/2026

“Predictably, Supergirl is being bashed sight-unseen by the usual online troglodytes. I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around the young male fan culture’s hostile aversion to seeing women onscreen. Part of the reason I’ve always loved going to the movies is because I enjoy looking up at giant, moving pictures of pretty girls. I thought everybody did.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/24/2026

“As a recovering Catholic, I can confirm being taught to be frightened of your desires is a core tenet of Christianity. The movie makes such fear and loathing manifest, entwining sex and violence in an amplification of the lads’ rowdy courtship rituals.There’s something hilariously Australian about boys throwing rocks at each other’s chests as foreplay.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/19/2026

“However academic you want to get about the actual Robyn Hode legends of yore, modern audiences are still going to think of men in tights and Disney’s wily cartoon fox. Yet in a strange way, that’s part of what Sarnoski’s film ends up being about. It’s a story about the stories we tell ourselves, and how we can’t help cleaning them up for our children.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/18/2026

“Adding to the pathos is how unnervingly elderly these toys sound. At 63, the grandma-voiced Cusack is a spring chicken in this cast. Listening to the 73-year-old Allen rasp his way through kiddie banter with the 69-year-old Hanks makes you wonder why Bonnie would want to play with senior citizens. Which I guess is part of the point.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/17/2026