Suffragette (2015, Directed by Sarah Gavron, 105 minutes, USA) BY ELIZABETH WIEST Director Sarah Gavron’s (Brick Lane, This Little Life) latest period piece Suffragette follows four proto-feminist foot soldiers through the smog and grime of nineteenth century London as they stir up a grass roots rebellion demanding women’s right to vote. The centerpiece of the film is a gracefully understated performance by Carey Mulligan as the daring Maud Watts, a factory worker, wife, and mother who becomes increasingly fed up with the indignities of life among Britain’s female proletariat. As her involvement with the burgeoning women’s movement intensifies, she becomes […]

  THE GUARDIAN: Kent Jones’s enjoyable documentary – presented in the festival’s Cannes Classics section – is a tribute to a pioneering act of cinephilia, cinema criticism and living ancestor worship. François Truffaut’s remarkable interview series with Alfred Hitchcock, conducted over a week at his offices at Universal Studios in 1962, was a journalistic enterprise which changed the way cinema was thought of as an art form. Nowadays, a young film-maker might envisage a similar exercise in terms of a film or cable TV series – but what Truffaut finally produced was text: a fascinatingly illustrated book, like the record […]

  WRONG REEL: So by now the majority of Marvel fanatics like myself around the world are embarrassing themselves weeping with joy over the first official trailer to Captain America: Civil War. I won’t even attempt to articulate the myriad ways I am reveling in the superhero carnage on display. I live for this shit and will be watching this on repeat for months. Seeing Cap, Bucky and Falcon teaming up, taking on the world, there are no words, just sheer joy at seeing my childhood heroes do what they do best. Newcomer Black Panther also looks totally badass. If […]

  THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES (2015, directed by Billy Ray, 111 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The Secret in Their Eyes, a new thriller opening today, comes to the screen with an impressive pedigree. A remake of the Academy Award-winning Argentinian film of the same name, it is helmed by director Billy Ray, coming off the Oscar-nominated Captain Phillips and co-starring two Oscar-winning actresses, Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts. It is the type of noir-ish mystery that is a formulaic house of cards one would hope Hollywood could mount with some sort of efficiency. With Roberts and […]

SPOTLIGHT (2015, directed by Tom McCarthy, 128 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Since 2003, writer/director Tom McCarthy has directed a steady handful of compact little character-driven indie features (The Station Agent, The Visitor, Win/Win) that have been among the most resonant U.S. films of our era. With Spotlight, his sprawling look at the Boston Globe‘s investigation of the Catholic clergy’s sex crimes, McCarthy gives the impression of a talent in full bloom. In his largest scale film yet, Spotlight takes us down the wormhole of abuse, lies and church power without losing us in the labyrinth or forgetting […]

  SPECTRE (2015, directed by Sam Mendes, 148 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Skyfall, the previous entry in the long-running Bond series, was one of the British secret agent’s strongest chapters and bringing Bond face-to face with his origins it would have been a perfect capper to Daniel Craig’s 007 trilogy. It was never meant to be though, Craig’s Bond films have been the franchise’s biggest grossers yet and he has been contracted to serve as Bond for five films (although Craig seems desperate to break that contract). Spectre‘s script unfortunately unwinds the Craig trilogy’s tidy symmetry, making […]

  BY SHARNITA MIDGETT Evil Dead fans rejoice because more of the beloved horror-comedy franchise’s patented zany gorefests is coming to a small screen near you on October 31st when a new sitcom created (along with Bruce Campbell) directed by Sam Raimi called Ash Vs Evil Dead premiers on Starz. The show features Bruce Campbell reprising his role as Ash Williams, the goofy anti-hero/chief zombie-slayer of the Evil Dead series as a war vet suffering PTSD and survivor’s guilt who gets sucked back into the war against Evil. Thank god he still has his chainsaw arm, and a new sidekick […]

  ROCK THE KASBAH (2015, directed by Barry Levinson, 100 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Barry Levinson has unleashed what must be in the running for the worst-reviewed film of his career, a wartime Afghanistan romp with the Clash-inspired title Rock the Kasbah, starring Bill Murray as a washed-up rock tour manager sent to Afghanistan. You can see what drew excitement for the project; a chance for Levinson to tap into themes from his previous hits Good Morning Vietnam and Wag the Dog, a chance for Murray to poke fun at the military like in Stripes and a […]

  STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984, directed by Jim Jarmusch, 89 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Jim Jarmusch’s first widely-distributed film, 1984’s Stranger Than Paradise, is a Criterion-endorsed modern classic, often pegged as being a crucial cog in the birth of the American independent film movement. But how does it play today? You’ll get a chance to see how this seminal slacker comedy plays with an modern audience this Saturday when The International House on the UPenn campus runs the dryly-comic yarn as part of its celebration of films from art house institution Janus Films. It would seem dishonest […]

  HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: New details about Hail, Caesar! — the Coen brothers’ upcoming “musical comedy” — have been revealed, thanks to their oft-collaborators: composer Carter Burwell and sound mixer Skip Lievsay. During the “Dolby Institute: The Sound of the Coens” Master Class, part of the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival, Dolby director Glenn Kiser asked the two to describe the early parts of their process with directors Ethan and Joel Coen. “We’re doing one now,” said Lievsay of Universal’s 2016 release, with an ensemble cast that includes George Clooney, Josh Brolin, Channing Tatum, Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Scarlett Johansson and Jonah […]

  Final poster for HUNGER GAMES: Mockinjay 2 just released. You’re welcome.