“If you find your way onto Bresson’s frequency, his films can feel like they’ve transcended cinema’s inherent artifice and found a purer, more exaltedly spiritual mode of storytelling. There’s a reason Paul Schrader has made an entire career out of remaking Pickpocket and Diary Of A Country Priest. There’s also a reason Bresson’s most beloved movie stars a donkey.” – Crooked Marquee, 10/13/2023
“At once a mystic oracle and half-kidding huckster, legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog has spent his six-decade career shooting on seven different continents, chronicling humankind’s fraught relationship with a cruel and indifferent universe through thirty-four documentaries and twenty dramatic features, as well as dozens of shorts, operas and television programs.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/09/2023
“There’s an offhand elegance to the way Almodóvar and his longtime cinematographer José Luis Alcaine construct their scenes that I find immensely pleasing to look at. Images flow into each other with effortless grace. Strange Way Of Life is so easy to watch, these thirty-one minutes seem to pass in five. I know I’m being greedy, but I wanted more.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/05/2023
“It falls on neighbors of all races and religious beliefs to put aside their petty differences and drive away these demons together, as apparently only ‘Kumbaya’ can cast out Pazuzu. It’s an exorcism as a group hug. The Benneton angle is so overplayed, on the way out of the theater a pal said he wished they’d gone all the way and brought in a Hare Krishna to help.” – North Shore Movies, 10/05/2023
”A short film with the weight and breadth of an epic, traversing continents and time periods while remaining stock still. Based on a 1977 story by Roald Dahl, it’s a literary adaptation unlike any you have seen before; a dramatic reading that uses theatrical techniques to simulate the enveloping experience of burrowing into a book you don’t want to put down.” – North Shore Movies, 09/29/2023
”There’s no better actor than Robert Redford when it comes to being full of shit. Here’s a guy who devoted his entire career to finding cracks in his own impossibly handsome facade. He’s always playing characters too good to be true, because they are. Yet I can’t help feeing he’s a little miscast here. Redford’s too pensive a performer to sell Waldo’s recklessness.” – Crooked Marquee, 09/29/2023
“Statham and Fox have an irascible chemistry, beating the crap out of each other in a love scene that ends with her panties dangling from the ceiling fan. It is, to my recollection, the first time an Expendable has gotten laid in one of these movies. They’re usually too busy getting blackout drunk at biker bars and arm wrestling with each other. Platonically, of course.” – North Shore Movies, 09/22/2023
“Like so many movies siloed off to subscribers in our streaming service dystopia, this nifty alien-invasion thriller is only available on Hulu, where most people’s miscalibrated televisions and tinny laptop speakers will mangle the cool colors and excellent sound design. I wish I’d been able to see it in a theater packed with teens in the mood for a good scream.” – North Shore Movies, 09/21/2023
“Director Craig Gillespie specializes in smarmy takes on true-life tales, and he tries to turn the GameStop saga into a slobs-versus-snobs comedy, albeit one suspiciously short on jokes. Dumb Money is mostly montages of news footage and memes interspersed with a few scenes in which famous actors look at their phones and say swears.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/21/2023
“The styles and subject matter are all over the map. The one constant is a sense of endless possibility. With the liberation of location shooting, lightweight cameras and faster film stocks came a new language of expression, which manifested in many of these movies as an intoxicating irreverence, the feeling that old rules were made to be broken.” – North Shore Movies, 09/18/2023
SPLICED PERSONALITY 