”The funniest movie I’ve seen in months. A marathon of sicko gallows humor that expands and expounds upon King’s short story in ways both irreverent and playfully profound, it’s a cathartically comic burlesque of gag-inducing set-pieces, rivaling the Final Destination films for Rube Goldberg death scenes. God help me, I laughed like a hyena.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/20/2025
”Zellweger has two Oscars, and one of them should have been for playing Bridget. (The other should have been for Jerry Maguire.) She can still pull off the randy, granny-panty humor, while her crinkly smile is suited to a sequel that’s funny but also heavier of heart. Zellweger and Grant knock the raunchy banter back and forth with a genuinely moving affection.” – North Shore Movies, 02/14/2025
”The problem with The Gorge is, well, the gorge. While the unexpectedly delightful first hour is given over to the pleasures of watching attractive, charismatic people fall for each other – something we see entirely too little of at the movies these days – it devolves into an uninspired, splattery shoot ‘em up full of dodgy CGI and hackneyed leaps of forehead-smacking illogic.” – North Shore Movies, 02/14/2025
”While it was admittedly idiotic of me to go looking for ideas in a $180 million Disney movie, for that price one should expect at least a modicum of craft. And on that level Brave New World is a catastrophe. This is an appalling-looking film, shot in TV standard medium closeups with a smear of fake film grain spackled over the image like an ugly Instagram filter.” – North Shore Movies, 02/14/2025
“You’ve got to have a lot of confidence to come up with a scene like that. But then it’s not surprising that Tøndel has got such swagger, given that he’s the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann. Armand is awesomely audacious and drunk on its own technique, though sometimes you might wish there was a bit more to the movie than audacity alone.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/13/2025
”Look, I’m not saying that every middle school kid should be allowed to see Blue Velvet, but watching it at that age blew open a lot of doors in my mind about what art was and what movies could do. Lynch taught us how to see films and television as more than mere plot delivery devices and embrace the many moods and mysteries they’re capable of conjuring.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/07/2025
“There are worse ways to spend two hours than listening to Led Zeppelin songs being blasted through an IMAX sound system, where the rhythm section’s bottom-heavy bombast rattles the walls. It’s also hard not to feel some affection for these kindly grandpas sitting around the library, wistfully reminiscing about when they used to wield the hammer of the gods.” – North Shore Movies, 02/07/2025
”The film depicts the dehumanizing process by which people are forced to watch helplessly as their homes and schools are bulldozed. It asks that we watch, too. I get why No Other Land might sound like a tough sell. But the thing about excellent films is that they deserve to be seen, even if the filmmakers have to bring them around from theater to theater themselves.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/06/2025
Joined my buddy Blake Howard on his weekly film review podcast for Patreon subscribers. We talked briefly about Steven Soderbergh’s latest, disagreeing on the merits of the ghost POV while applauding the fine performance by Chris Sullivan and Soderbergh’s superhuman stamina behind the camera. Also, Blake seems to really have a thing about realtors. – One Heat Minute, 02/06/2025
My second dispatch from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival includes capsule reviews of Hailey Gates’ Atropia, Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project and Sierra Falconer’s Sunfish (& Other Stories From Green Lake).
SPLICED PERSONALITY 