“It’s an excellent performance, reminding us how insanely charismatic Smith can be. But it’s also a fawning tongue bath of a movie, executive produced by the Williams sisters themselves, with every scene designed to remind you of their father’s apparent omnipotence and heroic determination in the face of adversity. They could have just bought him a tie.” – North Shore Movies, 11/19/2021
”I thought I had it all figured out, but Campion’s film blossoms into something far stranger and more seductive than its synopsis might suggest. A hothouse psychodrama about performative masculinity and the personas we put on so as not to feel so alone, it’s a menacing movie, thick with an atmosphere of lurid homoeroticism and repressed longing.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/16/2021
“A steroidal inflation of the humble palooka’s underdog saga into a jingoistic, MTV gladiator movie in which an oiled-up Stallone defeats Communism in the form of Dolph Lundgren’s Russian super-soldier. To revisit Rocky IV is to be reminded that even though you loved a movie dearly when you were ten years old, that doesn’t mean it’s actually any good.” – North Shore Movies, 11/16/2021
“Żuławski’s Possession is a singular cinematic experience and probably the greatest breakup movie ever made, in which all the roiling emotions are externalized and untethered from any recognizable reality. It’s the most unhinged thing I’ve ever seen, and that’s before she starts sneaking off to have graphic sex with a giant, slimy tentacle monster.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/11/2021
“Mitchum mastered a look of mild amusement at the machinations of the Western and noir plots that followed his characters around. He sometimes seemed like he’d already seen this movie before and was killing time until cocktail hour, unflappable in his commitment to effortlessness. The Rat Pack guys swaggered. Robert Mitchum sauntered.” – Crooked Marquee, 11/05/2021
“Spencer has a lot of the same problems as Lisey’s Story, Larraín’s eight-hour Stephen King adaptation that aired to little notice on Apple TV+ this past summer. He’s a filmmaker who thinks in bold, often abstract images and concepts that don’t always sit well alongside conventionally scripted scenes. I liked the movie a lot until I didn’t anymore.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/04/2021
“Dismissed in some circles as a Spanish spin on Girls, the filmmaking has such a wispy, gossamer touch it’s easy to miss how much she’s getting at here in the guise of a breezy confection. Only in the fiendishly clever closing credits do you realize the deep denial diagnosed in El Planeta is suffered not just by these two characters, but also the modern world.” – North Shore Movies, 11/04/2021
“A film about mourning, but in an especially British, stiff upper lip fashion. As in the original movie, which dealt with the ravages of addiction in an almost oblique, muted mode, the roiling emotions are kept close to the vest. Hogg again employs an eggshell color palette and elliptical edits. The surfaces are placid, beneath them lies turmoil.” – North Shore Movies, 11/04/2021
“Earlier this summer, critic Gerry Peary was conducting a Facebook poll of the best American film noirs, asking colleagues for ranked ballots of their favorites. As I am apparently the only movie reviewer in the world who hates making lists, I was completely flummoxed by Professor Peary’s assignment and told him to just put Touch Of Evil down ten times.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/01/2021
“There are bits that you could do a couple years ago that you can’t do now. When has that not been true? Culture evolves and mores change. You can’t go back. And the flipside of it is, you have to let people adapt. If you said something that was untoward eight years ago, well it was eight years ago. Good for you, if you’re willing to learn and grow.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 10/28/2021
SPLICED PERSONALITY 