DAVID EDELSTEIN: The new “Star Trek” picture, “Star Trek Beyond,” is a wild ride. It’s fast and furious, which makes sense, since director Justin Lin made the last few “Fast And Furious” movies. And he thinks in terms of whoosh and jangle. He bombards you with angles. You have to concentrate or the action will streak right by. It’s like abstract expressionism. Now, if you’re a lover of the original series, you might think, I like “Star Trek” because it wasn’t fast and furious. It was philosophical. Well, I’ve got news. That “Star Trek” is gone. Since the series […]

  VULTURE: The genius of The Lobster, the English-language debut of Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos — whose 2009 wonder Dogtooth was the first Greek movie since 1977 to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film — is that it does not make the assumption that fuels every rom-com and love story known to man: that we can choose how we find love. In the world of The Lobster, all single people are sent to a hotel for 45 days in order to find a mate. If they fail, they are turned into an animal of their […]

THE GUARDIAN: In the first of two videos shot when director Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Bronson) was making The Neon Demon in Los Angeles last summer, Danny Leigh and the director motor round town, stop for a haircut and visit a parking lot where Refn recently saw a man die. They also discuss why a self-confessed ‘wholesome Danish socialist’ still prefers success-orientated LA to any other place, as well as the point at which Hollywood iconography became forever fixed. MORE

  SLADE IN FLAME (1975, directed by Richard Loncraine, 86 minutes U.K.) OIL CITY CONFIDENTIAL (2009, directed by Julien Temple, 106 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC British rock gave us plenty of adorable mop tops and fey dandies but they also have a long tradition of rough and tumble r&b, rock and blues bands whose fan base ran strong beyond the sophisticated borders of London and into the wilds of the country’s midlands. This month’s double bill joins two rather different films about two different bands, navigating the wild waters of the 70s music industry. Slade in Flame […]

  BY JAMES M. DAVIS If you wanna play art rock and be the cool guitarist guy the first thing you need is a Fender Jaguar and a bunch of pedals.  The second thing you have to do is decide which Fender Jaguar/Jazzmaster art-rock icon it is that you want to imitate.  Most people go for J. Mascis or Thurston Moore.  Who are we kidding, you’ll probably wind up doing Thurston Moore. However, I would only ask you to take a moment, look around you, and listen for a single word, breathed under one’s breath: americana.  There is a confusing […]

  LOVE & FRIENDSHIP (2016, directed by Whit Stillman, 92 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Whit Stillman’s world of arch comic verbosity has always had the stiff air of ingrained upper crust manners, so the idea of Stillman doing a period Jane Austin adaptation seemed perhaps a bit too spot-on. Instead, it’s a match made in heaven. Far livelier then your typical velvety old British romance, Love and Friendship finds Stillman snapping into great mid-career form as he propels Kate Beckinsale gliding through stately manors and defying the patriarchy by steadily willing her own destiny. Set adrift since […]

  BY JAMES M. DAVIS “Enhanced Individuals,” we hear in a newscast at the beginning of Captain America: Civil War, need to be brought into check. At first glance this phrase does what is intended, it deprives superheroes of being both “super” and “heroes.” This is a world where masked super-people have (accidentally) killed innocent people in operations unapproved by any governmental body. Through this phrase we are brought into a world where the Avengers are being asked to sign an accord with the UN which would essentially turn them into a peacekeeping force at the beck and call of […]

  LOOKIN’ TO GET OUT (1982, directed by Hal Ashby, 120 minutes U.S.) SECOND HAND HEART (aka THE HAMSTER OF LOVE) (1981, directed by Hal Ashby, 102 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind’s popular tome about American film in the 1970s, Hal Ashby is held up as the quintessential director of his era. Ashby specialized in humanistic tales of outcasts looking for love and struggling to find their place in the world and the seven films he made between 1970 and 1979 make for an unusually rich and diverse body of work, […]

  NEW YORKER: Davis’s life, in his own telling, is a trouble-filled adventure, in which racism and drugs, hedonism and violence, artistic vision and brute desire are intertwined. The hardest thing for an artistic biography to accomplish is to associate the art with the life without reducing the pure artistic drive to psychological and sociological determinism. Even though “Miles Ahead” fails in this regard, I have sympathy for Cheadle’s odd uses of some of Davis’s greatest music. For instance, Davis’s violent fight with Taylor is depicted as occurring while the other four members of Davis’s superb “second quintet” are rehearsing […]

  Anybody who’s never seen Convoy is unwittingly living a life of diminished expectations. Anybody’s who’s seen it knows what diminished expectations feels like. It’s kind of a lose-lose where everybody wins!

  VULTURE: It’s a shame that ‘Batman v Superman’ is also a storytelling disgrace. It has maybe six opening scenes and jumps so incessantly from subplot to subplot that a script doctor would diagnose a peculiarly modern infection: “disjunctivitis.” Said infection is the upshot of a sort of gene-splicing. For a studio to move beyond the “franchise” and “tentpole” stages to the vastly lucrative “universe,” a comic-book movie must at every turn gesture towards sequels and spinoffs, teasing out loose ends, cultivating irresolution. The movie wanders into so many irrelevant byways that it comes to seem abstract. There’s enough going on to […]

Adventures of a Secret Kidd: The Mass Hallucination of Kenn Kweder: TEASER from john hutelmyer on Vimeo. ADVENTURES OF A SECRET KIDD: THE MASS HALLUCINATION OF KENN KWEDER SCREENS @ INTERNATIONAL HOUSE @ 7 PM TONIGHT 

  KNIGHT OF CUPS (2016, directed by Terrence Malick, 118 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It took a lot of mental thrashing to come to this conclusion but weeks after screening Terrence Malick’s latest magnum opus Knight of Cups, I feel comfortable saying that it is a major Terrence Malick film. What else is there to compare it to? Who else in Hollywood can drum up such a plush budget and major box-office stars to make a plotless, nearly dialogue-free rumination on the big meanings of life? And who else could make it something you’d want to watch? […]