”One of the director’s breeziest, most consistently delightful efforts. Until the final scenes sneak up on you. Cecilia is a surrogate for our sometimes troubling but inescapably romantic relationship with the movies. These silly fantasies might be no good for anybody, but life would be unbearable without them. As someone once said, the heart wants what it wants.” – Crooked Marquee, 04/26/2024
“Challengers may not be a great movie, but it’s the kind I wish we saw more of: unabashedly lusty even if that means being a bit ridiculous sometimes. One floridly melodramatic encounter between Tashi and Patrick in an alley is punctuated by squalls of litter and stray newspapers whipping through the air, as if a twister had been stirred up by their roiling passions.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/25/2024
”We used to worry a lot about selling out back then. The coolest celebrities treated their popularity as an affliction, and the only thing worse than being famous was wanting to be. In an age when everyone’s thirsty for likes and follows, characters carrying on about integrity must sound like alien transmissions from a distant solar system that burned out centuries ago.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/23/2024
”A warm, spring breeze of a movie, They All Laughed was writer-director Peter Bogdanovich’s personal favorite of his films. Most days it’s mine, too. The 1981 rom-com is a gossamer confection flush with the lightheaded feeling of first falling in love. It feels casually enchanted, with a melancholy undertow that can’t help but be intensified by the true-life tragedy that followed.” – Crooked Marquee, 04/19/2024
”There’s a lot of blather in this talky Tarantino knock-off, which feels like a script that’s been sitting in somebody’s desk drawer since the late 1990s that’s been dusted off and hastily updated with only the most annoying contemporary horror trends. It’s the worst of both worlds, really, which is too bad because the idea behind the movie is admittedly juicy.” – North Shore Movies, 04/19/2024
”The biggest impression is made by brick shithouse Alan Ritchson, star of the Amazon series Reacher, which has gotten two seasons so far out of how much fun it is to watch a human tree trunk break stuff. Here he plays a smiling, psychotic Swede so powerful that when he uses a bow and arrow, the arrows sail straight through his targets and also kill the guys behind them.” – North Shore Movies, 04/18/2024
”Do you have to fully understand a movie in order to enjoy it? I don’t think so. Such was the case when I emerged in a pleasantly confounded state from The Beast at last year’s New York Film Festival. I saw the picture again last week and I’m not sure that I’m any closer to wrapping my head around it, but if anything I’m even more impressed. It’s a whole mood, this movie.” – North Shore Movies, 04/14/2024
”Sting is basically like E.T. except if Elliott had instead befriended a venomous space insect that wanted to eat Drew Barrymore. It’s curious that Charlotte calls the spider Sting, since spiders don’t actually sting people and it would obviously be a better name for a either a bee or the bassist from a reggae-influenced ‘80s New Wave band, but I digress.” – North Shore Movies, 04/14/2024
”What’s exasperating is how cynically Garland contorts his storytelling in order to avoid implicating any potential audience members, indulging popular rightwing fantasies about armed insurrection and lefty fears of imperial presidencies while remaining vague and noncommittal about the reasons for the war. He wants to play with firecrackers without setting them off.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/11/2024
”I wish the film had been allowed to explore some of these ideas in full, instead of laying pipe for past and future installments. Like most prequels, it only makes the story feel smaller. It’s dispiriting seeing such talent in the service of a spreadsheet. The First Omen proves that Arkasha Stevenson is a real filmmaker. Now someone should let her make a real movie.” – North Shore Movies, 04/05/2024
SPLICED PERSONALITY 