“I can’t imagine what seeing The Mortal Storm must have been like for audiences when it was first released, but I can tell you how unsettling it is now. Eighty-five years ago it might have been distracting to watch Hollywood stars playing Germans who slip into authoritarianism. Today their American accents just make the movie seem more sickeningly timely.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/13/2025
“Song is trying to take the heightened genre conventions and bring them back down to Earth. Materialists is too high-minded a movie to come up with a contrived misunderstanding that results in a classic rom-com, running-through-the-airport ending. But without that kind of corny catharsis, the film doesn’t end so much as it deflates into the closing credits.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/12/2025
“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
SPLICED PERSONALITY 