“The movie isn’t much interested in exploring its central gimmick — I’m not sure if I should be annoyed or grateful that it doesn’t try to explain how these two are able to text each other — mostly content to be a treacly teen romance between a dull young man with no faults and an irritating girl with poor priorities. It’s like Peggy Sue Got Married without the wisdom.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/19/2024
”A fascinating hybrid of stage and screen. Despite some striking, classically Frankenheimer compositions, it’s always very much a recording of a theatrical performance. At no point does it feel like you’re watching an actual quote-unquote movie. But you are watching The Iceman Cometh starring Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan, and that’s sure as hell something.” – Crooked Marquee, 09/13/2024
“The gulf between intention and ability has seldom been wider than in Kevin Smith’s attempt to fashion his own Fabelmans-esque origin story. You’d reckon it would be impossible for someone to do something 15 times without learning anything, but it beggars belief how much worse Smith has gotten at the basics of camera blocking and shot composition.” – North Shore Movies, 09/13/2024
”The manic, channel-surfing structure of the thirty-year-old film mirrors modern attention spans, with tacky advertising and proto-reality TV talk show freak-fests intruding on a conspiracy of corporate malfeasance. To watch Fresh Kill today is to realize that the more things have changed, the more they’ve stayed the same. And not in a good way.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/11/2024
”There’s a handcrafted quality to the images and effects. Even the stuff that’s CGI is designed to look practical, with smooth computer animation given janky little quivers to seem more like traditional stop-motion. The movie feels like a person made it, which is a rare thing to say about a blockbuster sequel these days. It’s also light on its feet, which is even rarer.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/05/2024
“A children’s film for the adult diaper set, Reagan is an almost pitiably incompetent movie with production values that look like it should be playing on basic cable between catheter ads and commercials for Gold Bond medicated powder. It’s a defensive safe space for Fox News viewers to get their rocks off remembering a romanticized past that never was.” – North Shore Movies, 08/30/2024
”With her gangly, akimbo limbs and wide, anime-character eyes, Duvall didn’t look like other leading ladies of the era. Or really any era, for that matter. Yet there was something mesmerizing about her. Even in the dizziest comedies she had an ethereal, melancholy quality that drew the viewer in. Shelley Duvall wasn’t just a great actress. She was transplendent.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/27/2024
“The hit muscial was an unlikely career choice for Huston. In hiring the then-76-year-old director, Stark said he was hoping to mimic the movie’s storyline, figuring the macho, larger-than-life brawler would be won over by the sweetness of his young charges. Indeed, it’s incredibly amusing to think of the elephant-hunting Huston surrounded on the set by singing little girls.” – Crooked Marquee, 08/23/2024
”One of those enervating exercises in IP regurgitation that only exists because somebody owned the rights and felt like getting paid. I suppose it’s unfair for any actor to get stuck following Brandon Lee in this role, but Skarsgård looks especially silly in his Jared Leto Juggalo Joker tattoos. Maybe not every fondly remembered film needs to be a franchise?” – North Shore Movies, 08/23/2024
“What follows is an extremely tedious mashup of Get Out with Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories and the ‘fuck the patriarchy’ keychain politics of Promising Young Woman. It’s such an off-putting stew of ill-considered gimmicks and attitudes that could charitably be described as unexamined, you can’t help but leave thinking less of the people who made the picture.” – North Shore Movies, 08/23/2024
SPLICED PERSONALITY 