I, TONYA (Directed by Craig Gillespie, 119 minutes, USA, 2017) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Much buzzed-about this Oscar season, I, Tonya is an unlikely prestige film about an unlikely Olympian starring Margot Robbie as the notorious Tonya Harding, the disgraced figure skater who conspired to have her rival maimed by her bodyguard right before the 1994 Olympics. This black comedy is constructed like a mockumentary, in the vein of The Big Short, where on-camera interviews with actors in character (“based on irony-free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews” with the actual people portrayed in the film)  are supplemented by reenactments […]

THE SHAPE OF WATER (Dir. by Guillermo del Toro, 123 min., 2017, USA) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Easily the strangest film this prestige season is Guillermo del Toro’s eccentric romantic masterpiece The Shape of Water. The film opens today at the Ritz Five and is a rather unique take on a love story that is an unlikely mash-up the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, City of Lost Children, Amélie) and the Universal Monsters. Shape has del Toro returning to his roots to give us a darkly fantastic fairy tale that has the director at his best and most unrestrained […]

STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI (Directed by Rian Johnson, 152 minutes, 2017, USA) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC With Thursday’s release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi  director Rian Johnson picks up the reigns of the space opera mega-franchise left by J.J. Abrams.  Given the bleakness of Looper and cleverness of Brick, I was more than a bit curious to see what Johnson would do in the Disney® sandbox. Surprisingly enough not only did Johnson make it through making the film without being fired — no small achievement, that — but he turned in a film that feels very much […]

THE DISASTER ARTIST (Dir. by James Franco, 104 minutes, 2017, USA) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC The best in “So Bad It’s Good” cinema usually has one thing in common. Invariably, the auteur at the helm — everyone from Ed Wood to Michael Bay — sincerely believed they were making the best film possible. You can’t fake that kind of sincere ineptitude and those that have tried usually fall short of the mark, with the ensuing film choking on its irony. The Room (2003), the subject of The Disaster Artist, is one of those rare films that was born of […]

  BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC This year at the Philadelphia Film Festival I got a few moments to pick the brain of screenwriter/director Dan Gilroy on the red carpet, who’s quickly made a name for himself crafting engrossing narratives around unlikely protagonists. The follow up to his acclaimed directorial debut Nightcrawler is Roman J. Israel, Esq. a film starring Denzel Washington as a legal savant with what appears to be Asperger’s syndrome. Roman is forced to fend for himself after the death of his legal partner who was the face of their team, the people person — while Roman […]