”Not even your most sophisticated home entertainment system can replicate the communal feeling of a whole room full of strangers shrieking and screaming at the same time. There are more than 40 frightening films showing at Boston area indie theaters over the 10 days between now and Halloween. Here are a handful of highlights.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/21/2024
“The world doesn’t want Norman to get well. Characters constantly taunt this sick man as if trying to bait him into living down to their worst expectations. By flipping our perspective to see one of film history’s most famous monsters as a tortured protagonist more sinned against than sinning, Psycho II asks us why we come to see movies like this in the first place.” – Crooked Marquee, 10/18/2024
“A breathless sprint of ‘print the legend’ falsifications, harmless fibs and outright smears. That Reitman would resort to shitting on actual mavericks George Carlin and Jim Henson while spit-shining the legend of a middlebrow mogul like Lorne Michaels should be no surprise coming from modern cinema’s most obsequious company man. He’s a natural born suit.” – North Shore Movies, 10/12/2024
”This was De Palma’s Godard era, shortly before he pledged allegiance to Alfred Hitchcock. But despite the blackout sketch structure and improv comedy hijinks, Hi Mom! is unmistakably a Brian De Palma picture: endlessly self-reflexive, obsessed with ways of watching and being watched, always implicating the audience in the action with a wicked cackle.” – Crooked Marquee, 10/11/2024
”One can admire aspects of Abbasi’s film while wondering who exactly it’s supposed to be for. Trump’s supporters don’t want to see him portrayed this way, while the rest of us have grown so incredibly sick and tired of this man who has occupied such an outsized space in our daily lives for nearly a decade, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to go see a movie about him.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/10/2024
”The authors have taken over programming at the Brattle next week for a pair of double features presenting contrasting images of trans characters. Maclay explained, ‘We wanted the audience to see these films reflected off of one another. By putting them together, you get a full scope of the trans film image we’ve been positing with our book.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/03/2024
”A pointed rebuke to whatever enjoyment audiences may have gotten out of the first film, Folie à Deux feels punitive, not to mention like a perverse waste of resources. Why hire Lady Gaga if you’re not going to let her belt the songs out? I guess for the same reason that they used IMAX cameras to shoot a movie that takes place in like three dingy rooms.” – North Shore Movies, 10/02/2024
”Coppola’s dream project is a grandiose, go-for-broke folly, the last gamble of an 85-year-old legend pushing all his chips into the middle of the table. Every scene shows you something you’ve never seen before in a way you’ve never seen it. The film’s flaws are obvious, plentiful and did not bother me in the slightest. An hour after it ended I was still smiling.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/26/2024
“Wolfs doesn’t feel like a real movie while you’re watching it. It’s more like an uncanny simulacrum of something. A friend said he’d assumed the trailer was an elaborate Nespresso ad, and there is a sort of SuperBowl commercial vibe to the picture, though it put me more in mind of a fake movie parody in a Hollywood satire that isn’t particularly funny.” – North Shore Movies, 09/26/2024
“A movie about images that won’t stop over-explaining itself in words. Everything that’s clearly visible onscreen is also reiterated through declamatory dialogue and a voice-over narration so stilted and on the nose it makes Blade Runner sound like Days Of Heaven. There’s nary a moment in Lee when the pictures are allowed to speak for themselves.” – North Shore Movies, 09/26/2024
SPLICED PERSONALITY 