“The set of self-imposed limitations creates its own aesthetic. Jenkin’s hand-cranked camera won’t run for more than 28 seconds at a time, forcing him to tell the story in a series of punchy, discrete images. Our brains assemble the scenes almost like a mental jigsaw puzzle. It’s amazing how many gaps your mind fills in for you when prompted properly.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/09/2026
“Bernstein shoots the phone calls like fuck scenes, the first one climaxing with Eleni wrapped in the curly white cord as if it were bondage gear. It’s lurid and faintly ridiculous, yet knowingly so. She’s doing what Cronenberg did with Crash, exploring the destructive aspects of desire by fabricating a kink nobody has and examining it from the outside in.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 07/09/2026
“With his concave cheeks and haunted eyes, Harry Dean Stanton was nobody’s idea of a movie star. He looked like hard living personified; an iconoclast hanging out on the periphery of the New Hollywood revolution, lending his lonesome cowboy vibes to a remarkable array of landmark films. Just watching some of his movies makes the theater smell like cigarettes.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/07/2026
“It isn’t often a screen legend comes to Boston, and almost never do they deign to sit at a table full of nobodies. I recall being in awe when she walked into the room. I was doing a lot of these kinds of things at the time and I’ve never seen anyone better at this. Which I guess makes sense, since she’s been talking to reporters longer than I’ve been alive.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 07/06/2026
“It’s a generational divide you don’t see addressed much in film and television, where typically older folks are presented as prigs who can’t handle the candor of rebellious youth. As an aging Gen Xer, I’m thrilled to see a movie about how these days it feels like the opposite is true, expressly calling out millennials for being annoying little prudes.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 07/02/2026
“Shot by the superb cinematographer Hélène Louvart, whose handheld poetry is key to the films of Alice Rohrwacher and Eliza Hittman, Romería is a little confounding at first, but never less than visually ravishing. Llúcia Garcia, who plays Marina, has one of those captivating faces that can hold the camera all day. She even looks great with bangs.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 07/02/2026
“You don’t see a lot of children’s cartoons throwing around jokes about Eadweard Muybridge and Georges Méliès. But much to my delight, Minions & Monsters is stuffed silly with clever references to the early days of cinema. I applaud director Pierre Coffin for packing this film with jokes that even his target audience’s grandparents are too young to get.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 07/01/2026
“Hudson Hawk is a profoundly silly picture, lavishly overproduced with bursts of bizarrely gratuitous violence. Willis decapitates a henchman during a swordfight and quips, ‘I guess we won’t be attending that hat convention in July.’ You’re either on the movie’s wavelength or you’re not, and that hat convention line has been living rent-free in my head for 35 years.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/29/2026
“Given the nationalistic tenor of the proceedings, it’s amusing that they cast the most English-looking actor I’ve ever seen as George Washington. William Franklyn-Miller even has the name of a cad in a Jane Austen novel, and from certain angles he’s a ringer for Helena Bonham Carter. He’s one bad tooth away from being a human scone.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 06/29/2026
“A raunchy screwball comedy that improbably became the Walt Disney Company’s highest-grossing movie of 1986, Ruthless People is dirty but not smutty, naughty yet never nasty. From the bright, pop-art production design to the shadow-free lighting by future legend Jan de Bont, it looks and feels like a film where you know nobody is ever really going to get hurt.” – Crooked Marquee, 06/26/2026
SPLICED PERSONALITY 