“Hudson Hawk is a profoundly silly picture, lavishly overproduced with bursts of bizarrely gratuitous violence. Willis decapitates a henchman during a swordfight and quips, ‘I guess we won’t be attending that hat convention in July.’ You’re either on the movie’s wavelength or you’re not, and that hat convention line has been living rent-free in my head for 35 years.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/29/2026
“Given the nationalistic tenor of the proceedings, it’s amusing that they cast the most English-looking actor I’ve ever seen as George Washington. William Franklyn-Miller even has the name of a cad in a Jane Austen novel, and from certain angles he’s a ringer for Helena Bonham Carter. He’s one bad tooth away from being a human scone.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/29/2026
“A raunchy screwball comedy that improbably became the Walt Disney Company’s highest-grossing movie of 1986, Ruthless People is dirty but not smutty, naughty yet never nasty. From the bright, pop-art production design to the shadow-free lighting by future legend Jan de Bont, it looks and feels like a film where you know nobody is ever really going to get hurt.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/26/2026
“Resting on laurels and recycling old footage, it’s the film equivalent of a classic rock band releasing a greatest hits album and tacking on a few middling new tracks so that fans have to re-buy a bunch of songs we already own. You know Knoxville and the gang are out of gas when they can’t even make cameraman Lance Bangs throw up.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/26/2026
“Writer-director Fast isn’t a filmmaker overly concerned with making sure the audience understands everything that’s going on. Emily keeps losing track of time, with days on end disappearing in the attic. The film itself feels like it’s disassociating alongside her, scenes bleeding into each other in a sound bath of droning, fuzzy guitar feedback.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/25/2026
Always a treat talking to my buddy Blake Howard, this time about what went wrong with the new Supergirl reboot and why we liked the first part when it was ripping off True Grit way better than when it was trying to be Fury Road. We also discuss how ugly studio movies have gotten these days and wonder why these filmmakers won’t just go outside.” – One Heat Minute, 06/25/2026
“Predictably, Supergirl is being bashed sight-unseen by the usual online troglodytes. I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around the young male fan culture’s hostile aversion to seeing women onscreen. Part of the reason I’ve always loved going to the movies is because I enjoy looking up at giant, moving pictures of pretty girls. I thought everybody did.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/24/2026
“I suppose we should start this series at the beginning. Perhaps fittingly, my career as a professional film critic began with Clint Eastwood. His largely-forgotten 1999 programmer True Crime was the first movie I reviewed for Philadelphia Weekly. I was 24 years old, working as a cinema manager and writing terrible screenplays in my free time.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/22/2026
“Humphrey Bogart was still two years away from his first leading man role in The Maltese Falcon, but he’s already dominating the screen. You can see Cagney ceding scenes to Bogie, as if he were as delighted by him as we are. The third-billed Bogart is so electrifying you remember the character as being in more of the movie than he actually is.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/19/2026
“As a recovering Catholic, I can confirm being taught to be frightened of your desires is a core tenet of Christianity. The movie makes such fear and loathing manifest, entwining sex and violence in an amplification of the lads’ rowdy courtship rituals.There’s something hilariously Australian about boys throwing rocks at each other’s chests as foreplay.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/19/2026
SPLICED PERSONALITY 