“A pretty good explainer as to why most things you buy now are crap, BlackBerry dramatizes the collapse of the once-ubiquitous handheld device as a cautionary tale of tech bro hubris and the inevitable consequences of a growth-at-all-costs mentality. Interestingly ambivalent and scabrously funny, it’s an inverted Social Network for also-rans.” – North Shore Movies, 05/16/2023
“The sixties haven’t made it out to these small towns yet, where kids still listen to doo-wop and drink milkshakes in their muscle cars while cruising the downtown strip. Lucas’s sophomore effort is a wistful picture about the twilight of American innocence, set on the precipice of the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam. It’s the last night of summer, in more ways than one.” – Crooked Marquee, 05/12/2023
“Scary movies allow us safe spaces where we can work out our anxieties. And there were few things scarier or more anxiety-inducing than sex during the AIDS crisis. Yet even separated by decades from this subtext, these movies still thrill because they understood that desire can (and sometimes should) feel dangerous and dirty. That’s the fun part.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/11/2023
“One of the great American films, not for what it tells us about LaMotta, but for what it tells us about ourselves. Scorsese’s masterpiece is a searingly personal exploration of jealousy and self-loathing, seen (sometimes literally) through the eyes of a man who considers himself so unworthy of love that he cannot stop hurting those who care about him most.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/05/2023
“The beauty of Blume’s book is that it tackles big issues without making a big deal out of them. Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig smartly preserves that sense of proportion, keeping the movie grounded in believable, day-to-day interactions and lived-in 1970s-era details. To Margaret, these events feel tumultuous. To us, they’re wonderfully ordinary.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/28/2023
“With testimonials from the likes of Molly Ringwald and Lena Dunham, the guest list skews female for obvious reasons. But the filmmakers miss out on what a game-changer Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t was for little boys who had been so ashamed of what they were doing under the covers at night. Not that I would know anything about that.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/28/2023
“Ari Aster’s monstrously funny exercise in antagonizing the audience is smarty-pants sophisticated and crassly juvenile, often at the same time. It’s a surreal Oedipal saga in the spirit of gonzo, early 1970’s provocations like Where’s Poppa? and Little Murders. The movie is mean-spirited, deeply unpleasant and I laughed myself sick. Your mileage may vary.” – North Shore Movies, 04/28/2023
“‘There’s the film part and there’s the festival part,’ Tamm explains. ‘The film part gets a lot of attention, but the festival part is just as important. The event-ness of it all. It’s about people coming together and interacting with each other and interacting with the filmmakers. People missed that. People missed Q&As, and filmmakers missed getting in front of audiences.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/24/2023
“Like Fede Alvarez’s inexplicable 2013 Evil Dead, director Lee Cronin’s reboot-redux-whatever has no patience for the zany Bruce Campbell antics of Raimi’s original trilogy, playing the knowingly silly mythology boringly straight. This is one of the more baffling creative decisions in franchise-era filmmaking. It’s like remaking Airplane! as Zero Hour.” – North Shore Movies, 04/23/2023
“It’s a low-key character study tuned to Woodward’s exquisite performance, one of the decade’s finest. Rachel, Rachel features so many close-ups, a friend of Newman’s joked that watching the movie was like looking through his wallet photos. But you can hardly blame the happy husband, as her face registers so vividly the character’s secrets and lusty longings.” – Crooked Marquee, 04/21/2023
SPLICED PERSONALITY 