“Critic and curator Michael Koresky’s fantastic new book surveys 25 years of subversive subtext roiling and rumbling under the Technicolor surfaces of Hollywood films that followed the letter of the Hays Code but not the spirit. It’s a rollicking work of scholarship willing to take a close, thoughtful look at pictures deemed ‘problematic’ by today’s standards.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/12/2025
Joined my dear old NYU friend Jason Shawhan for a bonus episode of his podcast devoted to all things Jennifer Jason Leigh. We talked about returning to visit our old stomping grounds in New York City one month after 9/11 and how we wound up seeing JJL on Broadway in David Auburn’s Proof. A digressive reminiscence of a strange and nervous time. – Fearless Pretender, 06/06/2025
“It may sound strange to describe a Wes Anderson film as the summer’s most delightful action-comedy. Missing the usual Anderson undercurrents of grief and melancholy, it’s more gag-based than anything he’s done in ages, with an early bit involving a plane’s ejector seat so exquisitely timed it caused me to make a spectacle of myself at the press screening.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/05/2025
“Remember those straight-to-video spin-offs that used to clog the shelves at your local Blockbuster, offering the cheaper and less star-studded continuing adventures of Tremors, From Dusk ‘Till Dawn or American Pie Presents? The blatantly lousy Ballerina is not so much beating a dead horse as it’s making sure all the parts have been ground up for dog food.” – North Shore Movies, 06/05/2025
“This is a movie about a beautiful woman on a big shitty boat trying to fight off a psycho who wants to make her a meal for sharks, and the filmmakers understand that this premise is enough. At a time when so many horror films have been overthought into tedious dissertations, it’s a relief to find one that has nothing on its mind beyond showing you a good time.” – North Shore Movies, 06/05/2025
“Revisiting Dogma, we see an artist’s ambitions stretched beyond his abilities. The movie is a failure, but an honest one. It’s sad to watch today, knowing Smith would never again swing for the fences like this, spending the next 25 years catering to an undiscerning fanbase with reflexive indolence, turning his own laziness and incompetence into part of the joke.” – North Shore Movies, 06/05/2025
“Danny and Michael Philippou’s gnarly Hansel And Gretel riff follows two grieving step-siblings in the hands of a sinister foster mother played to the hilt by Sally Hawkins. In most movies like this when you’re supposed to believe a child is in danger, a part of you knows that the filmmakers wouldn’t dare kill off a little kid. These dudes would totally kill a little kid.” – North Shore Movies, 05/30/2025
“The thing about Irishmen is that they’re really good at telling stories, and whenever Bono tones down the airy abstractions and gets rooted in the specific, the movie becomes quite winning. The best parts involve the superstar’s fraught relationship with his emotionally withholding father. Get an Irish guy going about their Da and it’s gonna be a teary evening.” – North Shore Movies, 05/29/2025
“This unproduced screenplay penned by Brian De Palma in the 1990s is the blueprint for a most eccentric thriller. It’s a heady, tongue-in-cheek swirl of the director’s pet preoccupations, with the villain’s plan modeled on the opera house climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much. De Palma is literally weaponizing his love of Hitchcock here.” – North Shore Movies, 05/29/2025
“There’s not much to Thompson’s play beyond folksy wisecracks and pat affirmations. But director Mark Rydell’s big-screen version boasts an alchemical element which makes On Golden Pond far more than the sum of its treacly parts. The leads aren’t just movie stars, they’re movie legends. It’s twilight for the Thayers, and for an entire era of Hollywood.” – Crooked Marquee, 05/23/2025
SPLICED PERSONALITY 