“Spielberg’s most Altman-esque movie, casting a wary eye on institutions his later pictures would exalt. The mayor from Jaws became such a popular meme during COVID-19 because the film is bracingly up front about how people in charge are not necessarily looking out for your best interests. There’s a New Hollywood cynicism that’s missing from his subsequent work.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/27/2025
“Chopped down to 62 minutes and dubbed into English, the film played on double bills alongside something called Mixed-Up Women. Such presentations cemented for generations the notion that Swedish films were full of frolicking nude starlets, a misconception I imagine led to unpleasant evenings for anyone who wandered into The Virgin Spring.” – Crooked Marquee, 08/22/2025
“Ron Howard’s lurid, misanthropic melodrama follows a doomed collection of German expats trying to forge a new utopia in the Galapagos. There’s no need for snakes in this Eden when you’ve got such shitty neighbors. Campy and cruel, the movie is an unexpected hoot, showing off a naughty mean streak in Opie that would horrify Aunt Bee. I like him like this.” – North Shore Movies, 08/22/2025
“Too slapdash to get a handle on, like Coen and Cooke started shooting before they’d figured out what story they were trying to tell. There are some amusing moments, a few intriguing ideas and a knockout movie star performance from Margaret Qualley as an aloof, no-nonsense private eye. But almost nothing in the picture connects.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/21/2025
“These are the kinds of pictures where if the characters stop at a store, the shopkeeper is going to have a whole story of his own going on. They’re generous films, warm in a way that can’t be faked. The sets are cluttered like people actually live there, the mismatched thrift shop fashions messy the way life is. Demme was a rare filmmaker who actually seemed to like people.” – Crooked Marquee, 08/19/2025
“As a tenured professor of film studies at NYU, Lee is appropriately reverential of the source material while also still a big enough goofball to pour tons of fun Spike stuff on top of it. The director’s hallmarks are all here: gravity-defying dolly shots; the swelling, horn-heavy score out of a 1940s melodrama; at least five endings; and incessant sports-related tomfoolery.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/14/2025
“Turning navel gazing into performance art, Gray obsessively recounted the minutiae of his life as a way of imposing order on an existence he found overwhelmingly chaotic. Telling stories is how we explain our lives to ourselves, but Swimming To Cambodia is about what happens when a seasoned storyteller comes up against the unexplainable.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/12/2025
“A lot of confident technique adding up to very little, Cregger’s follow-up to his fiendishly entertaining Barbarian plays with the same sort of hairpin plot curves and abrupt, left-field perspective shifts. But Weapons is a gloomier and more muddled affair. If this guy ever decides to make a movie that’s about something, he’s gonna knock it out of the park.” – North Shore Movies, 08/08/2025
“Ebulliently silly, awash in bright colors and sunny Los Angeles locations. Gen Z’s eye-rolling disdain for their embarrassing elders provides the comic motor of this often very funny film, and having grown accustomed to being on the receiving end of such withering glares, I think I might have enjoyed the movie even more than my niece did.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/07/2025
“This was an important afternoon for me, as a kid obsessed with the latest Star Wars and Spielberg pictures realized that old black-and-white movies could also be a blast. I had so much fun watching The Lady Vanishes that I put off seeing it again for another 40 years or so, fearing that the film couldn’t possibly live up to the thrill of that first discovery.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/25/2025
SPLICED PERSONALITY 