“The screenplay is pretty boilerplate stuff. Think Hoosiers with Dennis Hopper as the head coach, or The Bad News Bears if Buttermaker’s alcoholism was supposed to be sad. But the thing about formulas is that they work, and it’s impossible not to get swept up in the familiar beats of a misfit coach turning around his losing team just in time for the playoffs.” – North Shore Movies, 03/08/2020
“It’s all exhausted Southie stereotypes and donkey Irish burlesques, most characters carrying on like that Casey Affleck Dunkin’ Donuts commercial from Saturday Night Live. The low point is probably a bar brawl during a Sox game while everybody’s singing ‘Sweet Caroline.’ This is the kind of Boston movie you’d expect from a couple of Lakers fans.” – North Shore Movies, 03/06/2020
“Reichardt movies are immersive experiences, inviting you to settle in and let your metabolism power down to their pace. These are films of loaded glances and pregnant pauses, where even the slightest gestures become seismic. The stories are told in the spaces between the dialogue. Everything’s happening when it seems like nothing’s going on.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/05/2020
“This 1982 romantic drama was independently bankrolled by a wealthy Louisiana family of mortuary owners and made with an all-black cast and crew, most of them working in their positions for the first time. It’s a vital artifact from a lost part of film history, a tantalizing glimpse of a nascent black independent cinema movement that almost was.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 03/03/2020
“Suffused with a twilight longing, the most moving moments for me are the film’s evening montages, whether it’s the sun going down to the sound of Jose Feliciano’s ‘California Dreamin’’ or the achingly lovely parade of neon signs clicking on at dusk as the Stones sing ‘Out Of Time.’ All good things will soon come to an end, probably sooner than you think.” – The Muriel Awards, 03/01/2020
“Balagov’s extraordinary second feature is about life amid the ruins. It’s a story about carrying on after the unimaginable, when things are supposed to go back to normal as if they ever really could. The production design externalizes these characters’ inner lives, the crumbling city and its shellshocked inhabitants bearing the scars of a five-year siege.” – WBUR’s The ARTery 02/27/2020
“During production Kubrick flinched at the book’s downer ending, asking his co-writers to come up with a last-minute reprieve for these doomed men. But Douglas was having none of it, box office be damned. The closest thing we get to catharsis is the star’s spectacular pronunciation of the word ‘degenerate’ during a final, ineffectual rant.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/24/2020
“As a collection of talking heads all nodding in admiration, haphazardly assembled with some relevant movie clips and chintzy music, this is boilerplate dead-celebrity bio-doc stuff that will make pleasant enough home viewing for those with a mild interest in the subject. In other words, exactly the kind of stuffy hagiography Pauline probably would have hated.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/21/2019
“After four flights in the Millennium Falcon, Harrison Ford has proved himself peerless when it comes to palling around with comically oversized canines that don’t actually exist, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at how moved I was by his relationship with Buck. Ford does what all the special effects can’t pull off. He makes you believe the dog is real.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/19/2020
“A big part of of going to the movies is the pleasure of looking at beautiful women, but I don’t think we’re supposed to say as much in polite company these days. So it’s something of a relief when a film takes this aspect expressly as its subject, and Portrait Of A Lady On Fire is indeed all about the act of looking, and what it means to be seen.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 02/12/2020
SPLICED PERSONALITY 