”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
”The most anxious comedy you’ll see this year, director Nathan Silver’s Between The Temples is a love story in the midst of a nervous breakdown. Except it feels like the movie itself is having the breakdown. Silver is an expert at the everyone-talking-over-each-other school of cinema, whipping the scenes into swirling frenzies of semi-controlled chaos.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 08/22/2024
”Negovan has toned down the old ultraviolence and gotten rid of Guccione’s precious pornography, making this a classier Caligula for a more refined audience, which somehow makes the movie even worse. Shorn of all the grody fucking that casued such a scandal, it’s now merely a tedious historical pageant with fine actors wandering around looking lost.” – North Shore Movies, 08/19/2024
“Last Summer is a remake of writer-director May el-Toukhy’s 2019 film Queen Of Hearts. Breillat’s version of the story is far less melodramatic and (surprisingly) less sexually explicit, yet somehow feels more dangerous, throwing itself into the transgressive tale with a wry reserve and an abundance of mordant wit. Good lord, is this movie funny.” – North Shore Movies, 08/16/2024
SPLICED PERSONALITY 