“No living director so evocatively photographs a tangle of limbs, or is as adept at capturing the electric charge of two people sharing a small physical space. Like most Claire Denis films, Both Sides Of The Blade is about the battles between our bodies and our minds, wherein our unexplainable longings beat out logic and what’s good for us every time.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/14/2022
“There’s no frame around the proceedings, nor any character introductions for the sake of the audience. We’re thrown into the action via a herky-jerky, 16mm handheld camera bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter around the performers in black-and-white, following their rapid mood swings from back-slapping bonhomie to chillingly sudden spurts of hostility.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/01/2022
“The movie mashes up a whole stew of ‘90s action tropes and rips entire pages out of the screenplay for Speed. But since this is another affair from producer Randall Emmett’s cash-strapped crap factory, we can assume most of the film’s funding was divvied up amongst the twenty-eight credited producers as not a lot of dollar value has actually made it onscreen.” – North Shore Movies, 07/01/2022
“Given the increasingly likely possibility that it will not have another, one can’t really be blamed for wanting to celebrate America’s 246th birthday by getting lost. Luckily it’s a big country, and the Brattle Theatre has a dozen movies screening over the next ten days that rack up more interstate mileage than an entire season of Diners, Drive-Ins And Dives.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/30/2022
“It’s all a convoluted way to turn these 1990s relics loose on modern times, and while the world may have changed, Beavis and Butt-head blessedly have not. There are a few flashes of the satirical genius that creator Mike Judge brought to his depressingly prophetic 2006 film Idiocracy, but for the most part, the movie is perfectly content to be brilliantly inane.” – North Shore Movies, 06/29/2022
“In a cleverly counterintuitive choice, the directors keep the camera locked down at a considerable distance from the performers. Any other movie would shove the zaniness in our faces with wacky music and close-ups, but these antics are wryly, amusingly entombed within a still screen full of dead air and empty space. Gargantuan egos have seldom seemed so small.” – North Shore Movies, 06/24/2022
“It’s a movie about a myth, one in which Elvis represents a dream of liberation — musical, sexual, racial — and how that dream was corrupted and commodified by carny-barker capitalists sociopathically sucking every last dollar dry, leaving the singer a druggy, bloated parody of his former promise, catatonic in front of the television. It’s the story of America.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/23/2022
“Abstracting the crimes and potential punishments shifts the threat from a national issue to something more existential, while Panahi’s emphasis on the quotidian, comedic hassles of a family vacation with which we can all identify makes these extraordinary circumstances universal. You realize this could happen to people like us because these people are us.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/22/2022
“It’s the first non-musical directed by Garland’s then-beau and future husband Vincente Minnelli, who coordinates the teeming Times Square and bustling subway stations like choruses. His camera captures such a pulsating sense of big city life the film is commonly mistaken as being filmed on location, when in actuality it was all shot on the MGM lot.“ – Crooked Marquee, 06/17/2022
“A tawdry, ten-hour miniseries about the making of The Godfather that’s so hilariously full of shit I can’t take my eyes off it. Normally I like to say there should be no such things as guilty pleasures, and if any work of art brings you enjoyment in this cold, rotten world you’ve got no reason to be ashamed of that. But we’ll make an exception for The Offer.” – North Shore Movies, 06/16/2022
SPLICED PERSONALITY 