“This is a gentle and humane film, keeping a respectful distance from the characters’ suffering. The most powerful dialogue exchanges in Tender Mercies are when people pause for a moment and really think before answering a question. We’re enormously moved by straightforward affirmations like ‘Yes, I do’ or ‘Yes, he is.’ Is that a lot harder than it looks? Yes, it is.” – Crooked Marquee, 03/13/2026
“It’s a terrible structural idea telling us up front that we’re going to have to listen to ten recordings. We can’t help thinking, ‘We’re still only on number six?’ I was hoping to hear something truly terrifying, like: ‘Here are a bunch of sports guys spending two-and-a-half hours ranking their favorite crime movies from the 1990s.’ The ultimate in podcast horror.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 03/13/2026
“I don’t believe for a second that there are this many upset ballet and opera fans. I think people are just tired of Timothée Chalamet. There are six months of promotional events, precursor ceremonies, sit-down interviews and gala rubber chicken dinners before the Oscar envelopes are finally opened in March. We spend half the year on year-end awards.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/12/2026
“That’s the responsibility of filmmakers to make images that penetrate your body and hopefully heal. It’s probably not the best moment to talk about the film, right after the operation, the surgery. Did you die watching the film? That was our intention, Santiago and me. We wanted to invite you to a catharsis. We wanted to invite you to die.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 03/09/2026
“With the synth-pulse soundtrack and vast desert spaces, Laxe is working in the mystic tradition of filmmakers like Herzog and Tarkovsky, but with the white-knuckle ruthlessness of an action craftsman. A friend left the film saying he wanted to drown the director in a puddle of radiator fluid. I don’t share his reaction, but I understand it. The movie works you over.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 03/08/2026
“A hellzapoppin’ cacophony of silly ideas and mad movie love, overhauling James Whale’s 1935 classic into a funhouse feminist manifesto. The exclamation point in the title is emblematic of Gyllenhaal’s try-hard approach, which doesn’t always land on the right side of cringe and could easily be exhausting if you’re in the wrong mood. I was in the right mood.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 03/05/2026
“Barclay’s documentary is ultimately a story of religion and the powerful hold it can have on those brought up in it; when Jesus said to love everybody, but the church says the way you love them is a sin. Music was Preston’s escape from his earthly torments, his way of reaching the divine. But that faith is also what drove his self-destruction.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 03/03/2026
“An exhausted excuse for a sequel, lacking a single new idea or any discernable reason for being. Taking place in a drab, suburban wasteland where everyone is tediously obsessed with a few murders that happened 30 years ago, the Scream movies have long ago shifted from an arch commentary on slasher movie tropes to an endless recycling of the same.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/28/2026
“Always a pleasure talking to pals Justin and Laura Khoo. This time we discussed Timothee Chalamet’s selfish pursuit of ping-pong excellence in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, and why kids these days seem to get so hung up on their protagonists having to be a good person. We also talked about the curious effect of Kevin Costner on periomenopausal women.” – Cows In The Field, 02/27/2026
“It’s easy to guess which parts of the movie Hadi personally remembers from growing up in Iraq. That verisimilitude is the film’s strongest asset. Yet it’s just as easy to guess which screenplay conceits the director gleaned from studying film at NYU, and what story points came from the Sundance Institute Labs. Basically, the movie is too real to be this phony.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/26/2026
SPLICED PERSONALITY 