“It’s also kind of a bummer to remember how high culture was once seen as aspirational, and that we could have a rock star conductor like Leonard Bernstein who strived to make the arts accessible to everyone. I grew up in a Boston where Arthur Fiedler was as revered a local hero as Carl Yastrzemski. It wasn’t that long ago.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 08/05/2026
“The funniest cameo is still Val Kilmer, doing his Doc Holliday accent in a Jim Morrison wig while trying to get the Sphinx-like Dylan to break. When I sat down with Kilmer in 2005 for the most bizarre interview of my career, he really lit up when I mentioned this film. I told him how many times I’d watched it, and he said, ‘That makes you, me and the editor.’” – Spliced Personality Substack, 08/03/2026
“Most of the dialogue is rancid, often riotously so. Stone tries to knock the earnest, do-gooder halo off the social issue drama by making his lead characters lowlifes. Half-Graham Greene, half-Hunter S. Thompson, Salvador isn’t particularly interested in the nuances of Central American politics. It’s more about the director’s ideal of a macho, alpha-male liberalism.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/31/2026
“Charli XCX plays the kind of girlfriend who complains that ‘we just had sex eleven days ago,’ and her unenthusiastic faking of an orgasm is one of the funniest bits of business I’ve watched in a while. It does your heart proud to see young Cooper Hoffman following in his father Philip Seymour’s footsteps as one of the great movie masturbators.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 07/31/2026
“In its gentle, unassuming way, Penny Lane’s enchanting documentary made me think about the mysteries of the natural world as much as any Terrence Malick or Werner Herzog picture. It’s a movie about ecosystems and our place in the pecking order, about behaviors that are taught and those that are ingrained through millions of years of evolution.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/30/2026
“Even the opening Marvel logo music is melancholy. With its themes of emotional abandonment, institutional betrayal and a torture-happy third act, Brand New Day is interestingly ambitious but really not very much fun. A bit visually jazzier than the woeful recent franchise standard. At times it almost looks like you’re watching a real movie.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 07/28/2026
“McElwee explains how Adrian’s death made his life feel like a movie with the reels out of order. Remake is his way of sorting through all these impressions and emotions, trying to make them make sense. We’re watching a master storyteller attempt to impose a narrative on a tragedy that stubbornly refuses to comply. Things just disappear.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/28/2026
“McElwee’s screamingly funny Sherman’s March was his breakthrough, a would-be historical documentary hijacked by the floundering love life of its director. Some of these women come off as eccentric, others downright insane. Yet he remains enraptured by all of them, politely lingering in their orbits and putting off his project for as long as they’ll allow.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/28/2026
“Neill was not a needy performer, and appeared perfectly content to let the women in his pictures take center stage. You can trace this tendency all the way back to one of his very first films. In Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 My Brilliant Career, Neill plays a strikingly handsome, lovelorn son of privilege who is bowled over by Judy Davis’ headstrong Sybylla Melvyn.” – Crooked Marquee, 07/24/2026
“Absolutely terrible, but maybe also kind of great? There’s a mulish integrity to Her Private Hell. Can you call something a failure when it succeeds in being exactly the movie the director wanted to make? The logical endpoint of Refn’s whole deal, like he’s reached his final form. I’m morbidly fascinated to see where he could possibly take things from here.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 07/24/2026
SPLICED PERSONALITY 