“‘I’ve always been fascinated by films within films,’ said the Brattle’s creative director Ned Hinkle. ‘The best instances of these are when an audience watching a film in the real world is brought into a cinema by the character onscreen and we all experience a particular moment together. It creates a crazy, almost metaphysical bond with the characters in the movie.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/25/2026
“In this case, half a movie is better than most in full. It’s a work of dazzling breadth and grandeur, with a naughty modernity that reportedly caused clashes on the set between filmmaker and star. (No doubt the Hays Office never would have allowed the prince’s panty-sniffing scene.) It may have taken 98 years, but Queen Kelly is finally ready for its closeup.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/25/2026
“Words like ‘corny’ and ‘cringe’ never occurred to Elvis Presley, a man incapable of irony. That’s why he was The King. Baz Luhrmann understands this, bless his rhinestone-encrusted heart. The gaudy Australian maximalist has spent the past few years trying to find bigger and louder ways to convey the Earth-shaking awesomeness of the Elvis experience.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/21/2026
“Yet for a knockabout comedy contrived as a way to make boat payments and get drunk on the beach, Donovan’s Reef is nonetheless fascinating on several fronts, not the least of which is its fantasy of benevolent colonialism in a tropical Valhalla. The island is a utopia lorded over by aging white warriors. Lucky for us their hearts are in the right place.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/20/2026
“Kubrick was fascinated by the ways in which we foolish mortals try to impose order on an indifferent universe, constructing elaborate systems and machinery that inevitably come crashing down around us. His dark sense of humor and the pitiless temperament of his films caused some to label him a misanthropist, though I’d say he qualifies more as a realist.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/19/2026
“Some actors vamp better than others. Margaret Qualley happens to be great at it, sashaying through the picture as a one-note femme fatale. She’s laying it on too thick, but you’re happy to see someone doing something. The only time Ford’s camera comes to life is when he’s trying to fit her seemingly endless legs into the widescreen frame.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/19/2026
“The film takes place in a nebulous emotional space after an amicable divorce, when a family is still figuring out how they’re going to move forward. Anna works with tapestries upon which she presses pieces of iron, making patterns out of the impressions they leave behind. That’s sort of what the movie is about: the faded residue of a relationship that’s over.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/18/2026
“You don’t get the sense that anything is being prioritized in a Gore Verbinski film, there’s just stuff everywhere. I wasn’t surprised to learn this script was originally written as anthology film, then retrofitted into a feature. None of the flashbacks pay off. It’s like binge-watching a whole season of Black Mirror in the middle of a movie.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/15/2026
“A collection of warmed over cops-and-robbers cliches that were already pretty hoary when Michael Mann threaded them together three decades ago in Heat, absent the doomy grandeur that elevates Mann’s routine policer material into poetry. Plodding and workmanlike, Crime 101 is as prosaic a picture as I’ve seen in ages.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/12/2026
“I think, particularly when you’re dealing with kink, if you’re treating the kink in an oblique way, or you’re panning away from it or whatever, then it feels like you as a filmmaker are casting judgement on it as something that deserves to be offscreen. Like it’s too scandalous for the screen. So I said, ‘We need to be able to see how these guys are fucking.’” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/12/2026
SPLICED PERSONALITY 