EW: Nina, the long-awaited and quite controversial Nina Simone biopic starring Zoe Saldana, is finally becoming a reality: On Tuesday, EW revealed the film’s poster and release date, and today, audiences get their first look at Nina’s trailer. The film follows Simone through her legendary career as an American vocalist, particularly her years living in isolation in France after finding it difficult to balance her singing career with her political activism. In France, she meets the man who will become her assistant-turned-manager, Clifton Henderson (Selma’s David Oyelowo). Nina is directed by first-timer Cynthia Mort. Controversy has plagued the film for years: Back in 2010, Mary J. Blige was […]

  BY CHARLIE TAYLOR boyband is a hilarious new mockumentary web series that, as the title suggests, lampoons the boy band phenomenon. In a verite style reminiscent of The Office or This Is Spinal Tap, boyband gives the viewer a behind the scenes glimpse of the making of a pre-fab pop stars, as five wouldbe teen idols are fed into the machinery of the pop industrial complex and emerge as the hapless competition of the likes of One Direction — or, as the show’s tagline puts it, “five doofuses make the transition from garage band to boy band.” Hilarity ensues. […]

  THE TOUCHABLES (1968, directed by Robert Freeman, 89 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC As part of The Philadelphia Art Museum’s “Pop Goes the Museum” exhibition The Secret Cinema will be presenting a rare screening of Robert Freeman’s 1968 Pop-tastic film, The Touchables in 16mm. Set in and around “Swingin’ London” The Touchables was dismissed by Renata Adler at the New York Times as “a sort of fidgety mod pornography, ” perhaps understandable in its time. Yet to modern eyes the film looks like a 60s fetishist’s catalog of groovy fashions, beautiful people, and Playboy Magazine-derived titillation, off-set […]

  Just as it was shocking that it took till 2014 to get a major fictionalized film of Martin Luther King Jr. it is surprisingly that the explosive story of The Black Panther Party would not have a major documentary until now. Stanley Nelson Jr.’s documentary Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution assembles all the important people and footage to tell this story of a revolution’s rise and its government-engineered fall with power and insight. It may have arrived late but in light of the Black Lives Matter movement the film has appeared right on time. — DAN BUSKIRK

  WHERE TO INVADE NEXT (2015, directed by Michael Moore, 119 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Screened for critics back in December, Michael Moore’s latest documentary Who To Invade Next, has dramatically changed context in recent weeks.  In December, Moore’s first film in six years seemed like another potent film essay critical of American politics.  Today, the film plays like an impassioned plea for the Presidential candidate who has made the issues discussed within a centerpiece of his campaign, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Despite the title, the film’s subject is not our military policy, it is is our […]

  NEW YORK TIMES: The humor website Funny or Die on Wednesday began streaming a 50-minute comedy that finds Mr. Depp portraying the businessman turned politician, full-blown comb-over and all. Kept a secret for months — no  small task in Hollywood — “Funny or Die Presents Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie” was released to coincide with Mr. Trump’s victory on Tuesday in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary. “It was a crazy, completely nuts idea that somehow we pulled off,” said Adam McKay, a co-founder of Funny or Die, which also counts Will Ferrell and Judd […]

BY BEN LEHMAN My last experience with a Michael Moore documentary was in 2004 when Fahrenheit 9/11 was released. I remember watching the film as a 10 year old with my Republican family in the context of the early days of the Iraq War. My parents were quick to dismiss the controversial film; like many Americans in those days, they firmly stood behind President Bush and the invasion of Iraq. The film was provocative and controversial, which are terms one often associates with Moore. But for his latest creative endeavour, Moore chooses a less controversial and more lighthearted approach. The […]

  BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It was a memorable year for big Hollywood blockbusters even if the best of them (Mad Max, Star Wars, Mission Impossible) were pieced together from ancient sources. But as someone who still shells out the premium to watch films in theaters, I don’t want to be catered to, I want to be shocked and thrilled by something I’ve never seen on screen before. Bemoaning the state of the U.S. film industry can seem like my default setting yet as I pieced together this year’s film list I was pleasantly surprised to find that almost […]

CONCUSSION (2015, directed by Peter Landesman, 123 minutes, USA) BY BEN LEHMAN Concussion tells the story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian immigrant, who first connected the dots between professional football and the epidemic of traumatic injuries it inflicts on players, and then stood up to the NFL when they tried to cover it up. While Omalu, portrayed by Will Smith, ultimately succeeds in blowing the whistle on the NFL’s suits, the film falls short of the goal line. When Dr. Omalu performs an autopsy on the body of “Iron” Mike Webster, a retired Pittsburgh Steeler, he discovers abnormalities in […]

  FRESH AIR FILM CRITIC DAVID EDELSTEIN: I don’t know how director Adam McKay pulled it off, but with “The Big Short,” he has made an exuberant comedy about the global financial apocalypse of 2008. It’s goofy, suspenseful, fast-moving and also manages to explain the labyrinthine fraud that led to the crisis. Because the more you understand, the more your mind is blown by the scope of the greed and illogic. Mckay is working from a terrific playbook, Michael Lewis’s book of the same name on the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. The film’s protagonists are traders, ex-traders, fund […]