INDIEWIRE: IFC Films has released the first official trailer for “Wildife,” and it’s not hard to see why Paul Dano’s feature filmmaking debut is one of the most talked about films of the year. The 33-year-old actor, best known for masterful performances in films such as “There Will Be Blood,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” and “Prisoners,” has evidently learned a lot observing many of cinema’s greatest living auteurs. The family drama premiered to much acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and also screened as the opening night film in La Semaine de la Critique at the 2018 […]
CINEMA: Free Passes To A VIP Searching Screening
Searching, which opens August 31stis the new cyber thriller starring John Cho as David Kim, a father whose 16-year-old daughter has gone missing. After 37 hours and not a single lead by the investigation, David decides to look on his daughter’s laptop for answers. This leads David down the rabbit hole,the film uses technology and the way we internalize it to tell its story of one man’s search for his daughter in the dark recesses of the internet. We have 60 passes for two to an advance screening Thursday, August 23rd at 7:30PM at the United Artist, King of […]
GEEK SQUAD: How Does DC Films Unf*ck Itself?
BY RICHARD SUPLEE GEEK SPACE CORRESPONDENT Marvel Studios has dominated the 2018 box office, raking in $3 billion from just two movies: Black Panthe and Avengers: Infinity War. And their success isn’t limited to the huge, highly anticipated movies with 200 superheroes shoved into them. People were even talking about B-List characters Ant-Man and The Wasp. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. Pictures’ DC Extended Universe is still fighting for relevance after Man of Steel (2013) launched the franchise with a whimper and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Suicide Squad (2016) transformed the franchise into meme fodder. Last year’s […]
CINEMA: This Is America
BLACKKKLANSMAN (Directed by Spike Lee, 135 minutes, USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC BlacKkKlansman is the real-life story of how the first African American police officer in the Colorado Springs Police Department infiltrated the Klu Klux Klan. Starring John David Washington (son of Denzel) as Ron and Adam Driver as his partner, BlacKkKlansman proves to be one of Spike Lee’ most ferocious social commentaries to date cleverly disguised as a hilarious buddy cop movie. Lee uses the very relevant narrative to comment both on the backsliding of race relations in America and how it wasn’t exactly an accident […]
CINEMA: We Are Young
BY MARIAH HALL Bo Burnham didn’t intend to write and direct a movie about eighth graders, it just worked out that way. In the New Yorker, he confessed, “I wanted to talk about anxiety…Anxiety makes me feel like a terrified thirteen year old.” Burnham started out as a YouTube star in 2006 and managed to flip viral video fame into a comedy career. Now he has written and directed his first film, Eighth Grade, about a middle-school girl named Kayla (Elsie Fisher). She makes YouTube videos that no one watches, aside from her endearing father, played by Josh Hamilton, […]
CINEMA: Free Tix To A Special VIP Advanced Screening Of Unfriended: The Dark Web Wednesday
Blumhouse Tilt is at it again slicing off another piece of high concept low-budget genre this time with the sequel to the mega-profitable found footage horror film Unfriended. Unfriended: Dark Web,which hits theaters next Friday, July 20th ups the ante of the found footage premise of the original with the events in this stand-alone tale of online horror transpiring in real time. The film centers on a millennial who happens upon a cache of hidden files on his new MacBook, luring him and his friends on a trip into the depths of the dark web. They soon discover someone has […]
CINEMA: Good Things Come In Small Packages
ANT MAN & THE WASP (Dir. by Peyton Reed, 118 minutes, USA, 2018) BY RICHARD SUPLEE GEEK SPACE CORRESPONDENT Where does the Marvel Cinematic Universe go after super soldiers, scientists, gods, raccoons, aliens, and an entire secret nation of Wakanda fought together against a single threat in Avengers: Infinity War? They scaled down — literally. Ant-Man and The Wasp is superhero story with less stakes. But that is not a bad thing. This film is a more personal story. Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang is a divorced dad just trying to keep his life together. He is focused on his […]
CINEMA: This Is America
THE FIRST PURGE (Dir. by Gerard McMurray, 97 minutes, USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC The Purge series has had an interesting trajectory throughout the last five years. While the first film was an interesting high concept meditation on race in a near dystopian future where one night of the year for 12 hours, any crime including murder is legal. The consistently profitable franchise now on its fourth outing has afforded writer James DeMonaco the ability to not so subtly comment the state of America. For example, the last film Election Year featured a blatant stand in for […]
CINEMA: There Will Be Blood
SICARIO 2 (Directed by Stefano Sollima, 122 minutes, 2018, USA) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Sicario, Denis Villeneuve’s mesmerizing 2015 Academy Award-nominated meditation on the US government’s invisible war with the Mexican drug cartels, isn’t the kind of film that leaps to mind when you think franchises. But the original story of one FBI agent’s descent into the Hell of south-of-the-border gangland drug warfare was populated with such uncommonly rich and dense characters — courtesy of screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s boffo script — that audiences simply demanded more. Directed by Stefano Sollima (Suburra), Sicario: Day Of The Soldado traffics in […]
CINEMA: Dinosaur Jr.
JURASSIC WORLD: Fallen Kingdom (Dir. by J.A. Bayona, 128 min., USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard return for what is now the second entry in the reboot/retcon of the Jurassic Park series Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom. Picking up three years after the fateful events on Isla Nublar, the film begins as the volcano on the island that once housed the dino theme park is about to erupt annihilating all life on the island. On the world stage, the US Senate is deliberating on whether or not they will intervene to save the island’s […]
CINEMA: All In The Family
HEREDITARY (Directed by Ari Aster, 127 minutes, USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Hereditary is the feature length directorial debut from Ari Aster who made a name for himself with a disturbing viral short about a family harboring a dark secret called The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011). It is also arguably the best horror in the last five years. Hereditary premiered at Sundance in January, and quickly became the film to see this year for horror fans when the buzz surround it hit a fever pitch with some calling it the scariest horror movie in years. […]
CINEMA: A Confederacy Of Dunces
EDITOR’S NOTE: Warren Lipka was a Phawker intern in 2015. BY DAVID EDELSTEIN FRESH AIR FILM CRITIC The heist movie American Animals opens with a cutesy title. This is not based on a true story. Then the words not based on disappear, leaving — this is a true story. I doubt any fiction writer could have dreamed up a heist so dumb, stealing the original of Audubon’s multivolume “Birds Of America” from the library of Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky. The movie is funny in spots, but it’s not a comedy. The British writer-director Bart Layton has set out to […]
CINEMA: The Terminator
Upgrade is a high concept, low budget techno thriller written and directed by Australian filmmaker Leigh Whannell, who is probably best known for his writing credits on the Saw and Insidious franchises. After making his directorial debut with the solid supernatural sequel Insidious: Chapter 3, Whannel is now tackling an original script that vibes like a William Gibson-penned ‘80s action film. The film stars Logan Marshall-Green, doing his best Tom Hardy impersonation as noted technophone Grey Trace who, during the course of a violent robbery that takes the life of his wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo), is rendered a quadriplegic. […]