“Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of 1990s nostalgia is the anodyne shit that’s being celebrated. I’m especially baffled by folks looking back fondly on Blockbuster Video, a vile, censorious institution that preyed upon local businesses and sucked all the funky individuality out of video store culture, leaving behind thousands of deserted blue-and-yellow storefronts.” – North Shore Movies, 03/24/2021
“For better and worse, the kind of deeply personal, idiosyncratic expression that’s normally never allowed to escape from the superhero industrial complex. The gargantuan four-hour running time is absurd, yet also an essential part of Snyder’s enormously overblown, sacramental vision. It is grand. It is ridiculous. It is, by anybody’s definition of the word, cinema.” – North Shore Movies, 03/22/2021
“A riveting recollection of an artistic eruption amid the crumbling ruins of New York City in the late 1970s. It’s about the birth of a confrontationally queer sensibility, the quiet tyranny of the donor class and the impossibility of separating politics from art, particularly during a pandemic that’s ravaging parts of the population deemed undesirable by people in power.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/19/2021
“A peek at ‘90s Hollywood kids partying and engaging in various image-incongruous activities that would no doubt horrify their parents and infuriate their agents. However obnoxiously edited, the film offers a touching glimpse of a cultural moment shortly before the paparazzi became fully weaponized and the Internet turned the whole world into a tabloid.” – North Shore Movies, 03/15/2021
“This is an office entombed by tradition, on the precipice of a great change nobody can see coming. Indeed, what’s most affecting is the wistful evocation of an era in eclipse. The story’s sometimes stock situations take on a melancholy undertow because we know we’re watching a bunch of analog dinosaurs who are about to be wiped out by a digital comet.” – North Shore Movies, 03/09/2021
“Seeing all these side characters awkwardly shoehorned in reminded me of how Joe Pesci kept showing up in the later Lethal Weapon sequels even though there was no reason for him to be around anymore after the second one. He was just there because it was another Lethal Weapon movie and they figured audiences expected to see him again.” – North Shore Movies, 03/04/2021
“A new 4K restoration of the film starts streaming at the Brattlite this weekend, finally giving us a chance to see what all the fuss was about almost 50 years later. The film chronicles the Pacific Rim stretch of Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland’s ‘Free The Army’ tour, a musical comedy revue modeled on Bob Hope’s USO shows but with an antiwar agenda.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/04/2021
“If you have an historical imagination, and that’s what the book demands — in fact, it’s what every work of art demands, in fact, it’s what life demands — if you have an historical imagination then (a) you won’t rename Abraham Lincoln high school, right? And (b) you’ll be open to this book and other books that try to deal honestly with the times that they’re writing about.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/26/2021
“Daniels is less interested in historical particulars than he is fascinated by the woozy, downward spiral of Lady Day. Unlike Bohemian Rhapsody or other such scrubbed, sanitized star bios, this is a fearlessly squalid movie, awash in bloody needles, blackened veins and a smoky, scarily compelling backstage atmosphere of rough sex and casual abuse.” – North Shore Movies, 02/26/2021
“You transform pain into other things as you go through life. That was all him working through it. I like stories about storytellers and I like stories within stories. Obviously, I wrote and directed a movie that starts with a twelve-minute bedtime story. I love that. I know that other people don’t love it as much as I do, so I have to be careful about it.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/17/2021
SPLICED PERSONALITY 