“Carney’s affable semi-musical is like the song itself: a drippy little MOR ditty that’s not quite catchy enough to get stuck in your head. Breezing along to a contrived, feel-good conclusion, Power Ballad is short on style — a lot of flat backgrounds and undistinguished two-shots — but good-natured enough that you can sit through it without feeling ripped off.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/09/2026
“A road movie with no destination, this sunny, sozzled comedy’s aversion to consequence can be delightful. At the same time, it does result in a certain rudderlessness, making the picture feel longer than it is. If nothing’s at stake for the characters, it’s hard for us to invest any deeper than the film’s surface pleasures, which luckily are abundant.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/06/2026
“What’s enjoyable is the fetishization of expertise, watching the weather wonk with an attitude flout all the back-slapping yahoos. There’s a lot of excellent acting in this movie. There’s also Brendan Fraser. His floundering turn as Eisenhower has got to be one of the most distractingly awful performances I’ve ever seen in an otherwise enjoyable film.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/04/2026
“There’s not a moment of behavior that does not beggar belief, with characters reacting so nonchalantly to mutilations, decapitations, made-up occult religions and mind control drugs, you’d assume such things were everyday occurrences for them. If I dared risk the wrath of Apple by spoiling some of these story points, you probably wouldn’t believe me. It’s that daft.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 06/03/2026
“Zemeckis’ sophomore effort was (barely) released four months before Reagan’s election and foretold a cultural revolution. The broadly satirical farce follows a cadre of gleefully amoral salesmen and rip-off artists pushing junkers while trying to screw the competition even harder than they’re screwing their customers. He saw the ‘80s coming a mile away.” – Crooked Marquee, 05/29/2026
“The ancient Greeks went to the theater for catharsis, to purge their fears in an act of communal cleansing. Such is the goal of Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair, an early summer festival of bad vibes that started five years ago at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles. Since then, the series has expanded to include nearly 100 theaters in 73 cities.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/28/2026
“The 20-year-old director’s eerie debut feature is set in a strip-mall purgatory of cheap office furniture and geographically impossible floorplans, like the Overlook Hotel by way of Bob’s Discount Warehouse. Brilliantly designed and dramatically underwhelming, Backrooms is more of an environment than a story. But it’s a really creepy environment.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 05/27/2026
“A promising story sunk by foolproof formulas, the movie has fresh characters, a novel premise and an interesting, underseen milieu. Then it runs them all through a forehead-smacking chain of events in such rigorous adherence to a standardized beat sheet you’ll be mentally announcing every plot development two scenes before it occurs.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 05/26/2026
“This kind of thing can be delightful if you’re on the picture’s wavelength, and extremely alienating if you’re not. Count me as one of the alienated this time around, as the cutesy too-muchness tipped into insufferable early on for this critic. I Love Boosters helped me finally understand why some people have such violent reactions to Wes Anderson movies.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 05/22/2026
“Tony Leung Chiu-wai plays a Hong Kong professor stranded at a German university during the COVID-19 lockdown. Lonely, stir crazy and 5,000 miles from home, our sad-eyed scientist becomes quite taken with a majestic gingko tree that towers over the school’s botanical garden. What follows is sort of like a buddy movie, told from the tree’s point of view.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 05/21/2026
SPLICED PERSONALITY 