“The pop music equivalent of The Star Wars Holiday Special. Both take place in that gaudy, bedazzled twilight time between the hoary ‘old showbiz’ vaudeville traditions of early television and the sleek, empty gloss that would come to define 1980s entertainment. It really was a ghastly aesthetic. Everything looks like moldering, aged cheese. With lasers.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/03/2026
“Trailblazers are saddled with the unfair burden of their actions becoming a referendum on their entire community. It took a class act like Sidney Poitier to desegregate Hollywood superstardom because he needed to be the antithesis of every stupid, hateful stereotype that movies had been helping to poison the world with since the medium was invented.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/02/2026
“An unstructured montage of the First Lady’s entrances and exits, it’s endless scenes of a woman with no discernible personality walking in and out of rooms, occasionally accompanied by a voice-over of empty, ChatGPT-sounding banalities delivered in an affectless monotone. Melania shouldn’t even be called a documentary. It’s just footage.” – North Shore Movies, 01/31/2026
“A deeply moral movie that tap-dances on third-rail subject matter and throws around verboten language to call out the racism and hypocrisy undergirding America’s cherished frontier myths. Blazing Saddles is as powerful a revisionist Western as Unforgiven or Little Big Man, it’s just incredibly silly about it. The film is full of childish humor, but treats you like an adult.” – Crooked Marquee, 01/30/2026
“A Private Life isn’t the kind of movie that spawns sequels, but I wouldn’t mind watching these aging exes solve a few more mysteries together. Auteuil has a softness that cushions Foster’s pointy features and flinty line deliveries. These two feel familiar in ways we instantly believe. It’s awfully sweet watching a couple of sixty-somethings get hot for each other again.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/29/2026
“Despite being one of the most violent movies ever made, the predominant feeling is that of joy. The swirling camera works as a dance partner to these absurdly charismatic performers and the nimble grace with which they glide through the destruction. You find yourself laughing aloud, not derisively, but in gratitude because you can’t believe what you’re seeing.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/22/2026
“Suffused with a gentle, trickster spirit, the picture’s rose-tinted, Depression era Americana and idealized notions of honor among thieves are even bigger cons than the one pulled off by the protagonists. But we in the audience are willing marks. The Sting is both a grift and a great escape. It makes you nostalgic for something that never was.” – Crooked Marquee, 01/16/2026
“This bummed me out. If you’re from Boston, you probably have an outsized emotional investment in these guys, and it’s sad that there’s no ambition to the picture, no aspiration to excellence. Disposable even by the standards of Netflix movies, it diminishes them and their partnership to appear in something like this. It’s Matt and Ben’s Righteous Kill.” – North Shore Movies, 01/16/2026
“Adapted from Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir, the film is a fragmented flood of images and sensations putting us in the anguished headspace of its protagonist. Stewart asks a lot of the viewer, leaving us to stitch together story threads through flashes of a sometimes unreliable memory. We don’t see scenes so much as slivers and shards of a shattered life.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/15/2026
“Fastvold frames Lee’s life as a musical folk tale, with old Shaker hymns repurposed into earworms by Oscar-winning composer Daniel Blumberg. Seyfried’s ardent, bug-eyed performance sells her testimonies with a devout certainty that’s oddly comforting. You can see why so many people followed her to America. I’d follow Amanda Seyfried anywhere.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 01/15/2026
SPLICED PERSONALITY 