“Kids are expensive. 79-year-old Robert De Niro just had another one, his seventh. Alimonies aren’t cheap either, nor I imagine are property taxes when you own half the hotels and restaurants in lower Manhattan. What I’m saying is that the guy’s got serious overhead and About My Father is a painless enough way for a beloved actor to pay some bills.” – North Shore Movies, 05/26/2023
“Palladoro avoids the cathartic arguments that usually fuel this kind of family drama. Instead, he’s content to just be with these people, sitting alongside them and observing, mostly in moments of repose. At times, Monica feels like a movie made up of all the stuff other movies cut out. This unconventional approach yields unexpected rewards.” – North Shore Movies, 05/26/2023
“An accumulation of lived experience is felt over the film’s 147 minutes, eschewing melodrama in favor of meaningful gestures and knowing nods. But the repetitiveness of the Same Time, Next Year scenario becomes a bit of a chore as the characters enter into middle age. There’s some excellent filmmaking on display here. There’s also an awful lot of it.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/25/2023
“A deliberately outrageous provocation, Master Gardener seems designed to stir up the kind of social media discourse that will make you throw your phone into the ocean. But then, that’s always been this director’s deal. If Scorsese is cinema culture’s beloved grandpa, Schrader’s the irascible uncle who says amusingly inappropriate things during holiday dinners.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/18/2023
Jazzed to join my dear friend Jen Johans for the second chapter in her epic exploration of Dennis Hopper’s career. Alongside pals Jed Ayers, William Boyle, S.A. Cosby and Jordan Harper, we discuss the actor’s miracle year of 1986, when a newly sober Hopper reestablished himself with the triumphant trifecta of Hoosiers, River’s Edge and Blue Velvet. – Watch With Jen, 05/16/2023
“A pretty good explainer as to why most things you buy now are crap, BlackBerry dramatizes the collapse of the once-ubiquitous handheld device as a cautionary tale of tech bro hubris and the inevitable consequences of a growth-at-all-costs mentality. Interestingly ambivalent and scabrously funny, it’s an inverted Social Network for also-rans.” – North Shore Movies, 05/16/2023
“The sixties haven’t made it out to these small towns yet, where kids still listen to doo-wop and drink milkshakes in their muscle cars while cruising the downtown strip. Lucas’s sophomore effort is a wistful picture about the twilight of American innocence, set on the precipice of the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam. It’s the last night of summer, in more ways than one.” – Crooked Marquee, 05/12/2023
“Scary movies allow us safe spaces where we can work out our anxieties. And there were few things scarier or more anxiety-inducing than sex during the AIDS crisis. Yet even separated by decades from this subtext, these movies still thrill because they understood that desire can (and sometimes should) feel dangerous and dirty. That’s the fun part.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/11/2023
“One of the great American films, not for what it tells us about LaMotta, but for what it tells us about ourselves. Scorsese’s masterpiece is a searingly personal exploration of jealousy and self-loathing, seen (sometimes literally) through the eyes of a man who considers himself so unworthy of love that he cannot stop hurting those who care about him most.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/05/2023
“The beauty of Blume’s book is that it tackles big issues without making a big deal out of them. Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig smartly preserves that sense of proportion, keeping the movie grounded in believable, day-to-day interactions and lived-in 1970s-era details. To Margaret, these events feel tumultuous. To us, they’re wonderfully ordinary.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/28/2023
SPLICED PERSONALITY 