READY PLAYER ONE (Dir. by Steven Spielberg, 140 minutes, 2018, USA) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Ready Player One is director Steven Spielberg’s cinematic adaptation of Ernest Cline’s 2011 best selling novel of the same name. Considering the book itself was a love letter to a decade in which Spielberg reigned supreme, it is something of a meta move for Spielberg to helm the film adaption. Curiously, Spielberg chose to tone down the book’s dozens of references to the his own work, while taking some fascinating liberties with the material. The resulting film is Spielberg doing what he does best: […]
CINEMA: Dog Day Afternoon
ISLE OF DOGS (Directed by Wes Anderson, 101 minutes, USA, 2018) BY JONATHAN VALANIA Near the end of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, Snoopy, a wire-hair fox terrier owned by Sam Shakusky, the bespectacled, coonskin-capped orphan-on-the-lam at the center of the film, is accidentally killed by an errant arrow. By way of eulogy, Sam is asked if Snoopy was a good dog. Unwittingly channeling the louche moral relativism of a Left Bank existentialist, Sam shrugs wearily and asks “Who’s to say?” Anderson’s new film, a stop-motion animated puppet pageant called Isle Of Dogs, dispenses with any and all such moral ambiguity: […]
Win Tix To A Super-Exclusive, Once-In-A-Lifetime Special VIP Advanced Screening Of The New Wes Anderson Animated Insta-Classic Isle Of Dogs
Wes Anderson is the two-word answer to the increasingly asked question: What good is a liberal arts education? There are times in this country’s history when we’ve had to take stock and ask ourselves: Do we really want to live in a world without English majors? And this is one of them. Let us rejoice, then, bundled up in our Blonde On Blonde scarves and winter beards, in this the darkest hour in American life since the rockets red glare and the twilight’s last gleaming, and check-in to The Hotel Andersonia where we will shelter in high style for […]
Q&A With New York Magazine Film Critic Matt Zoller Seitz, Author Of The Wes Anderson Collection
EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally published on March 14, 2014 Matt Zoller Seitz is the TV critic for New York magazine and Vulture.com and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. A Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker, Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image and The L Magazine, among other outlets. His five part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was later spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. Seitz is the founder and […]
CINEMA: Back In The USSR
DEATH OF STALIN (Directed by Armando Iannucci, 107 minutes, 2018, USA) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITICThe Death of Stalin is a hilariously morose comedy based on the French graphic novel La mort de Staline by Fabien Nury (Les chroniques de Legion). Director Armando Iannucci (Veep) brings his razor-sharp eye for political satire to Stalinist Russia without skipping a beat in a film that is way more relevant than it has any right to be today. The director even opted to “tone down real-life absurdity” to make the film, which has been banned in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan a bit […]
CINEMA: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
From Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom), Won’t You Be My Neighbor? takes an intimate look at America’s favorite neighbor: Mister Fred Rogers. A portrait of a man whom we all think we know, this emotional and moving film takes us beyond the zip-up cardigans and the land of make-believe, and into the heart of a creative genius who inspired generations of children with compassion and limitless imagination. Opens June 8th in select theaters.
CINEMA: From Russia With Love
RED SPARROW (Dir. by Francis Lawrence, 139 minutes, USA, 2018) BY EVAN HUNDELT Director Francis Lawrence’s seventh feature film Red Sparrow, starring his actorial muse Jennifer Lawrence, may, to the exacting cinephile, suffer from unbidden comparisons to his work with her on the culturally ubiquitous The Hunger Games quadrilogy. Whether or not Francis Lawrence consciously designed Dominika Egorova (the conscripted Russian special operative known as a “Sparrow,” stunningly portrayed by J.L.) with this nagging prospect in mind, what is certain, as emphasized bewilderingly in the film’s opening scenes (in which a cane-turned-warhammer figures prominently), is that Jennifer Lawrence has undoubtedly […]
CINEMA: Cat Scratch Fever
BLACK PANTHER (Directed by Ryan Coogler, 134 minutes, USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Black Panther catches up Chadwick Boseman’s Prince T’Challa — hands down the best part of Captain America: Civil War (2016) — upon his return to the fictional African nation of Wakanda in the wake of his father’s death. A quick prologue fills in the nation’s backstory: centuries ago a giant vibranium meteor crashed into Wakanda, helping the nation to flourish and advance at an amazing rate. Fearing this technological renaissance will invite marauding armies, the five governing tribes to seal off their small nation from […]
GEEK SQUAD: Black And Proud
BY RICHARD SUPLEE GEEK SPACE CORRESPONDENT Black Panther (2018) is the best superhero movie I have ever seen. Not just the best this year, not just the best since Captain America: Winter Soldier (2013) or Tim Bruton’s Batman (1989) not just the best with a person of color superhero. Just The Best. Period. The film was already hyped due to Disney’s Deaths Star size PR department but it is actually quality. Director Ryan Coogler (Creed, Fruitvale Station) brings the Marvel country of Wakanda to life. And he slams it right into the rest of the world. Wakanda is the most […]
CINEMA: The Bare, Ruined Choirs Of John Mahoney
AV CLUB: There’s a similarly loose resemblance between Mahoney’s character, a floridly boozy Southern author named W.P. Mayhew, and William Faulkner. Ethan Coen has acknowledged that discovering Faulkner had once worked on a wrestling picture starring Wallace Beery (Whaddaya need, a road map?) gave the brothers their way in on Barton Fink—the concept of an eminently serious author debasing themselves in order to, as Mayhew puts it to Barton, “make their way out here to the Great Salt Lick.” Like Faulkner, Mayhew is also a heavy drinker—Barton first discovers him puking in the bathroom—and he speaks in a casually baroque […]
CINEMA: The Dresser
THE PHANTOM THREAD (dir. by Paul Thomas Anderson, 130 min., USA, 2018) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC After more or less going dark for three years, Paul Thomas Anderson returns to the silver screen with Phantom Thread, his follow up to 2014’s Inherent Vice, which reunites him with Daniel Day-Lewis for what reportedly will be the famously enigmatic actor’s final film role. Much like The Master, Phantom Thread is an evocative exploration of the ever-shifting power dynamics of dysfunctional relationships in Post-War period dress. But in stark contrast to sprawling American epics like There Will Be Blood and The Master, […]
CINEMA: Paper Trail
THE POST (Directed by Steven Spielberg, 115 minutes, USA, 2017) BY CHRISTOPHER MALENEY FILM CRITIC Is Nixon done to death? With two movies out in the past six months alone, I have to wonder how much more we can squeeze out of the years between 1968 to 1974. It’s gotten to the point where they’re making prequels to classics like All the President’s Men; it won’t be long until they do a remake of it. Anyway, this year’s recycling of the journalistic wet dream that was the Nixon saga is The Post, which retells for film the real events of […]