“Pascal barely registers onscreen at all, with a good deal of Gladiator II serving as a cautionary tale about what happens to lightweight TV actors when they come up against a bona fide movie star. It’s like every scene is being acted in lowercase letters until along comes big-D Denzel. He’s an absolute joy to watch, and the film languishes in his absence.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/21/2024
“Unlike the Technicolor Oz we grew up with, Chu’s is a land of hazy, low-contrast pinks and faded pastels. The whole movie looks like an Easter basket, which can be tiring on the eyes over such a long haul. Still, it’s an engaging enough half-a-movie, anchored by a sublime comic turn from Ariana Grande as a privileged brat blithely oblivious to her own awfulness.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/21/2024
“You feel safe when other people are laughing. That’s why the movies are still playing. That’s why they find new audiences. People come up to me and say I saved their life, which is staggering to hear. But they just mean that wherever they were growing up, they didn’t think that anybody was like them. Then they saw these movies and realized there is another way.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/19/2024
Honored to have contributed an essay to Imprint’s Directed By Roman Polanski box set, which features the filmmaker’s underrated 1990s run of Bitter Moon, Death And The Maiden and The Ninth Gate. Blake Howard got myself and fellow contributor Lindsey Romain on the mic to talk about reckoning with art made by a known abuser when the art itself is about abuse. – One Heat Minute, 11/19/2024
”Such a noisy, witless puddle of CGI puke I can’t believe Ryan Reynolds isn’t in it. I suppose it will be tempting for critics to describe this movie as a lump of Christmas coal. Except that coal can actually serve a purpose, like heating people’s homes, or giving them black lung disease, both options preferable to sitting though Red One.” – North Shore Movies, 11/15/2024
“A monstrously funny middle finger of a movie that serves as a splenetic lean-in to pretty much every personal and professional criticism Allen has faced throughout his career. It’s a nasty picture, but feels liberating and fresh. Shaking off any semblance of decorum or need to be liked by the audience, the movie is unapologetic, even exhilarating in its rottenness.“ – Crooked Marquee, 11/14/2024
”The story takes place almost entirely on Murphy’s face, swimming in the infinite sadness of those ice blue eyes. The movie is hushed and has the damp chill of Irish winters. Delicate in its observations and devoid of histrionics, Small Things Like These is pretty much exactly the opposite of the kind of project you’d expect an actor to produce after winning an Oscar.” – North Shore Movies, 11/08/2024
”The notorious and oft-banned 1976 debut of writer-director Catherine Breillat is gross, shocking and undeniably the work of a major artist, even when it feels like a work in progress. This fragmented, expressionistic coming-of-age tale depicts a young woman’s pubescence as a sticky, horned-up horrorshow of errant desires and bodily betrayals.” – Crooked Marquee, 11/08/2024
“You don’t have to be an armchair psychologist to see how such stories spoke to the fears of traumatized men returning from WWII to find women had become more independent in their absence. Much in the way that the superhero movie craze started shortly after 9/11, it’s an American coping mechanism to process our anxieties through pulp.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/07/2024
“It’s a classy crowd-pleaser, deftly executed with the no-frills finesse that’s been the Eastwood brand for as long as I’ve been going to the movies. Juror #2 was obviously shot on a budget, with sets that look like they went up yesterday, but it’s got the kind of clean, clear storytelling beats that have become a lost art in contemporary Hollywood.” – North Shore Movies, 11/01/2024
SPLICED PERSONALITY 