“That’s right, someone named Tyler Rake actually kills a guy with a rake and nobody involved with the movie seems to find this remotely amusing. You can even feel the pause where a great ‘80s one-liner would belong, and you know Hemsworth would’ve delivered the shit out of it. But action heroes aren’t assigned one-liners anymore. They get tragic backstories.” – North Shore Movies, 04/24/2020
“Envisioning Ned Kelly’s army of outlaws as Iggy and the Stooges is indeed an unexpected angle, and Kurzel’s visual graffiti grows increasingly, interestingly rococo as the atrocities pile up. As one might expect from a film about murderous men wearing dresses, the whole thing simmers in a thick stew of malevolent homoeroticism.” – North Shore Movies, 04/24/2020
“Since launching in 2003 the festival has presented more than 1,650 films that would take 75 straight days to watch. In lieu of such an undertaking, I’ve selected a few favorite titles from over the years, so that through streaming services we might be able to create our own little IFFBoston at home. At least we have the movies to hold us over for now.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 04/22/2020
“Dirty jokes have a way of knocking down doors for students, and for this particular class clown, the Porter’s speech about alcohol provoking desire while taking away performance was key to my understanding that the plays of William Shakespeare were never meant to be musty objects of study, but rather broad, bawdy entertainments for mass audiences.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 04/17/2020
“An algorithm will never understand you the way an attentive clerk can, and the most touching parts of the film for me were scenes spent with the staff, so passionate about passing along discoveries and sharing sounds they love. One employee admits he probably would have grown up to become ‘a very unhappy lawyer’ if it hadn’t been for Other Music.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 04/16/2020
“A sprawling, multigenerational saga spanning several decades across different continents, Tigertail is also only 91 minutes long, so most of the time it feels like a trailer for itself. There’s no shortage of interesting scenarios and situations here, yet none of them are allowed to dramatically develop before we’ve packed up and moved on to another time period.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 04/10/2020
“So much of America’s idea of itself comes from the mythology of the open road. Ever the transcendentalist, Lynch sees the interstate as a sprawling symbol of humanity’s interconnectedness, a place to reach out and renew. The more embittered Eastwood is focused on highways that don’t lead anywhere, places where we can run but cannot hide.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 04/09/2020
“Breathtaking in its stripped-down simplicity, the film is a small miracle of inferences and implicit understandings. Hittman’s subtractions become additions in the audience’s imagination. Ultimately it feels like a cousin to the Romanian New Wave masterpiece Four Months, Three Weeks And Two Days by way of Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy And Lucy.” – North Shore Movies, 04/03/2020
“I thought we might keep the nocturnal vibe going by choosing two Scorsese movies that actually take place after midnight. 1985’s giddy, exasperating After Hours is an anomaly in the director’s canon in that it’s an out-and-out comedy, albeit an extremely nervous one, while 1999’s Bringing Out The Dead is one of the filmmaker’s most underappreciated works.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 04/03/2020
“What makes the movie so moving is that we watch the family learning how to live with the diagnosis, and perhaps more importantly, learning how to joke about it. There’s a raw power in this footage I’m not sure the filmmakers really have a handle on, as it hits upon that primal human need to turn grief into art, to salvage something positive out of all this sadness.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 04/02/2020
SPLICED PERSONALITY 