“I think as a trans person who now looks back at their obsessive youth caring more about Buffy’s high school experience than their own, it’s hard not for me to interrogate the ways in which the screen was a place for me to put my love that was safe. The fiction available to me on the screen was almost like microdosing something that I wasn’t getting in my real life.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/09/2024
”Granted, it’s still an exploitation picture. But it’s an uncommonly thoughtful and haunting one, bumping up against the limitations of the genre in fascinating ways. Too somber and meditative to thrill its target audience while a little too cheap and skanky to be the moody meditation Hornisher is shooting for, it’s curiously affecting all the same.” – North Shore Movies, 05/09/2024
”There’s something intentionally disjointed about the filmmaking. The camera angles are slightly obtuse and ambient sounds are mixed distractingly loud. Hamaguchi deliberately uses such disorienting cinematic devices to evoke the disharmony and inevitable imbalances in man’s relationship to nature. His scenic shots of the forest are hardly soothing.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/08/2024
”Sometimes we just want to watch movie stars being charming. The Fall Guy understands this well enough that you’re inclined to give the rest of the messy movie a pass. Still, a shorter, cheaper version probably would have worked a whole lot better. It’s easy to imagine a 105-minute incarnation directed by John Badham being a mid-summer programmer back in 1988.” – North Shore Movies, 05/02/2024
”Lee’s novel became a sensation on TikTok, probably because it keys into some of the weirdest mental health issues infecting our youth-obsessed culture. Alas, the movie has been carefully engineered to avoid or at least gloss over most of these matters in favor of an excessively pleasant wish fulfillment fantasy buoyed by the chemistry between its two leads.” – North Shore Movies, 05/02/2024
”The festival is about more than just watching movies, it’s about joining a room full of strangers and experiencing our common humanity together. As a culture, we had to get used to staying home alone, and I think there’s considerable evidence that it made people kind of crazy and mean. Events like IFFBoston remind us that we’re part of a larger community.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 04/29/2024
”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
SPLICED PERSONALITY 