“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
“Maybe the best way to describe Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is that it feels like a movie made by a 14-year-old. I mean this as a compliment. This is a dreamy and occasionally foolish film made with the heedless ardor of first love, a movie of frightening, sticky desires and irrational anger. It’s also the kind of thing that makes literary purists want to pull their hair out.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 02/11/2026
“I’ll cop to giggling in appreciation more than once at the threadbare exuberance of Luc Besson’s often risible craptacular, which has been thrown together with no particular interest in Bram Stoker’s oft-told story, but a mad love of making images. Especially silly ones. It’s Besson’s attempt to do cinema du look on a discount budget. Let’s just say the seams show.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/08/2026
“The thing about pop crazes is that they’re ephemeral. But the entertainment industry is designed to drag them out until there’s no more money or audience goodwill left to be plundered. The Moment is aptly titled because such things are fleeting, and we’re watching an artist try to figure out in real time how much of herself should be for sale.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/06/2026
“The protagonist is played by first-time actor Ubeimar Rios. He’s a fascinating physical specimen who appears to have been put together out of mismatched parts, with arms too short for his body and a mouth too big for his face. Yet however awkward and off-putting, Rios imbues him with a shabby nobility. We believe that Oscar wasn’t always like this.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 02/06/2026
“It’s to La Cava’s great credit that these madcap shenanigans never feel forced or shrill. The long, elegantly constructed scenes accumulate characters and momentum like a snowball rolling down a hill. This was a glorious period in American cinema during which everyone spoke as quickly as possible. Even bad jokes sound funny if you say them fast enough.” – Crooked Marquee, 02/06/2026
“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
SPLICED PERSONALITY 