CREED 2 (Directed by Steven Caple Jr., 130 minutes, USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Creed 2 picks up a few years after the first film where Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) wins both his Mustang and the world championship title from Danny ‘Stuntman’ Wheeler. With Johnson now the world champion, from the shadows emerges Ivan Drago and his son Viktor to challenge him, not just the title, but for a chance at redemption. After the events of Rocky IV, we find Ivan was left disgraced not only in front of Russia, but his family as well. Ivan’s wife […]
0 F*CKS GIVEN: Once Upon A Deadpool 2 Trailer
GIZMODO: The PG-13 recut of Deadpool 2 will feature much of the film’s original footage […] as a kind of test run to gauge how successfully the studio might be able to fold Deadpool into Marvel’s larger cinematic universe which has always skewed more family-friendly. MORE
GOSH: Q&A W/ Napoleon Dynamite‘s Jon Heder
BY HENRY SAVAGE When the world seems to consistently take a crap on you, it can feel as if there’s nothing left to do than to practice a few moves from your “D-Qwon’s Dance Grooves” VHS tape (for all you Napoleon diehards out there). Almost 15 years after it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, Napoleon Dynamite has become an American comedy classic. What started back in 2002 as a class assignment for BYU’s film school (originally titled Peluca) went on to become the acclaimed indie comedy Napoleon Dynamite. Since then Napoleon Dynamite has become a comedy lodestar for […]
CINEMA: Life Of Brian
EDITOR’S NOTE: On the occasion of Brian Wilson’s sold out performance at Parx Casino tomorrow, we are re-posting our review of the 2015 biopic Love & Mercy. Sail on, sailors! LOVE & MERCY (2015, dir. by Bill Polhad, 120 minutes, USA) BY JONATHAN VALANIA Love & Mercy tells the harrowing, heartbreaking story of the life of Brian Wilson — Beach Boys auteur and resident genius — which goes like this: Angel-headed boy from Hawthorne, California, at the dawn of the 1960s, smitten by the harmonic convergence of The Four Freshman and the shimmering Spectorian grandeur of “Be My Baby,” […]
CINEMA: Season Of The Witch
SUSPIRIA (Directed by Luca Guadagnino, 152 minutes, USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC When discussing Italian horror’s influence on cinema as a whole you would be remiss if didn’t name check Dario Argento’s 1977 supernatural masterpiece Suspiria, a surrealist nightmare about a young girl who is sent to a dance school run by a coven of witches set to the score of prog rockers Goblin. As a devout horror fan, my initial response to the news that a remake of Suspiria was in the works was akin to hearing someone had planned to remake The Godfather. But director […]
AUTEUR NOUVEAU: Q&A W/ Director Jonah Hill
BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Mid90s, Jonah Hill’s directorial debut, is an impressive feat for a first-time filmmaker. This coming of age drama set in the skateboarding subculture of the 90s is heavy on the nostalgia as you would probably expect, but also has something genuinely important to say about youth. We experience the film through the eyes of Stevie (Sunny Suljic) the son of a single mother who is taken in by a group of skaters much older than him who teach him some very important life lessons and how to be a man. It’s not the film […]
CINEMA: Being Jenny McCarthy
FRESH AIR: Melissa McCarthy is not interested in playing pleasant characters — flawless women with perfect clothes and relationships. “Who wants to watch that?” she asks. “There’s nothing to sink your teeth into. … The people I love and like are filled with quirks and eccentricities. … We’re a bundle of all these different weirdnesses.” Instead, McCarthy became known for her comic roles in movies like Bridesmaids and The Heat — and for her impersonation of President Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, on SNL. More recently, McCarthy’s taken a turn into drama, playing the misanthropic writer and literary […]
CINEMA: Laurie Strode Will Have Her Revenge
HALLOWEEN (Directed by David Gordon Green, 105 minutes, USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC It’s been nine long years since the last Halloween film, Rob Zombie’s 2009 franchise-killing sequel to his ill-fated 2007 re-boot of the series. The latest chapter in the Michael Myers’ slasher saga — simply called Halloween — dumps six sequels worth of convoluted plot, mythology and character development to position itself as a direct sequel to the original 1978 film. David Gordon Green (Eastbound & Down) is directing this entry with a script co-written with Jeff Fradley and Danny McBride that picks up 40 […]
AN AUTEUR IS BORN: Q&A W/ Bradley Cooper
BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC A few weeks ago Bradley Cooper kept up his tradition of hosting a Philly “friends and family” screening of his latest film, this time with his directorial debut A Star is Born. Cooper who got his start playing the “pretty boy” on Alias, proved he could also be the “funny guy” in The Hangover but with A Star Is Born he’s effortlessly transitioned into the role of auteur. His highly-acclaimed re-imagining of Star, with songs furnished by Cooper and co-star Lady Gaga, is the tour de force unveiling of Cooper’s emergent triple threat: director, […]
GEEK SQUAD: Venom Defanged
Venom was one of Marvel’s most popular characters in the ‘90s. Built like a WWF Superstar, he looked cool in his black Spider-Man-esque onesie. And like any “good” 90’s comic Venom was extreme. He would straight up murder his enemies and eat them. But the comic struggled to figure out if Venom and his alter ego Eddie Brock was a hero or a villain or in between. So too does Sony’s Venom, the studio’s first attempt at a Spider-Man Shared Universe. But with no Spider-Man. And while that can work, it just doesn’t. Tom Hardy plays an Eddie Brock […]
CINEMA: Star Wars
A STAR IS BORN (Directed by Bradley Cooper, 135 minutes, USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC It’s been hard to ignore the buzz surrounding the latest incarnation of A Star is Born, which marks not only Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, but also the first starring role in a feature film for Lady Gaga. The pop icon had a rather successful transition from music to television taking home an Emmy for her work on American Horror Story, and this time she’s here to prove she can do it all and Cooper helps her get the ball across the goal […]
GEEK SQUAD: What’s Not To Love About The Captain Marvel Trailer That Just Dropped?
So, the Captain Marvel trailer finally dropped. First of all, seeing Brie Larson crash land on Earth and Samuel L Jackson narrate the first half of the trailer completely sells the film — it’s set-in-the-’90s trailer and jammed pack with action scenes. Captain Marvel is such a complicated character that giving a detailed history will be exhausting and pointless given that the film is invariably going to streamline her sprawling back story to avoid forcing audiences to juggle alien sleeper agents, cosmic spaceship accidents that merged an alien DNA with a human, children that were genetically aged, X-Men member Rogue […]
CINEMA: Let Us Prey
THE PREDATOR (Directed by Shane Black, 107 minutes, USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC It’s been eight years since the Predator last stalked our multiplexes and he’s back thanks to director Shane Black (who played Hawkins in the original), who reunites the franchise with its 80’s action roots. To fully realize this vision Shane has also enlisted co-writer Fred Dekker the man who gave us such ‘80s monster classics as The Monster Squad, Night of the Creeps and House. Given those two pedigrees, you know what to expect here, the film is as heavy on the laughs as […]