TENET (Directed by Christopher Nolan, 150 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC After months of delays,Tenet, the latest epic from blockbuster auteur Christopher Nolan finally hits theaters this week.The film that many hoped would kickstart theaters after the pandemic has been up until this point shrouded in secrecy. I was given the chance to review it for Phawker, but only if I viewed it in a theater, of course. Nolan is all about the theatrical experience and like the rest of his catalog, this film benefits from being projected as loud and big as humanly possible. While I […]

BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC (directed by Dean Parisot, 91 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Shrouded in rumor, and two decades of production delays, many fans feared Bill & Ted Face The Music was going to be a lot like the epic disaster that was Guns and Roses’ Chinese Democracy, when it finally hit screens. With word trickling out every once in a while, praising the concept or the script, touting it as a worthy successor to the series, which for the third film in a franchise is basically unheard of; the longer we waited the […]

TINY TIM: KING FOR A DAY (dir. by Johan von Sydow, 78 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Growing up in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, situated just a stone’s throw from the Mason Dixon line, we didn’t get a lot of celebrities coming through our neck of the woods. In fact, in the ten plus years I lived there, the closest we got was an extra from 12 Monkeys — and Tiny Tim, who came through one year with the traveling circus. I was probably eight or nine at the time and I remember two things […]

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC On the surface PizzaGate sounds like one of those grotesque conspiracy theories scraped from the bowels of 4Chan. In this alt-right fairytale propagated in the darkest reaches of Facebook and Twitter, Hilary Clinton and the democratic party were running a child sex ring out of the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria. In 2017, this was the catalyst that drove Edgar Maddison Welch, to travel from North Carolina to Washington DC with three automatic weapons in an attempt to free the imaginary enslaved children, shooting up the pizzeria in the process. Director John Valley has […]

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC The best genre films do double duty, entertaining us while simultaneously saying something socially relevant. Project Power Netflix’s entry into the superhero arena does just that, by combining a very timely message with a superhero story that feels like something that was cribbed from some near-future headline. The film stars Dominique Fishback as Robin, a young woman from inner city New Orleans who is forced to deal a new drug called Power that is all the rage, to help make money for her mother’s diabetes treatment. Power essentially works like this: you take the drug […]

SHE DIES TOMORROW (directed by Amy Seimetz, 86 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Now streaming on VOD, She Dies Tomorrow perfectly encapsulates the psychology — some would say fatalistic psychosis — of living in 2020. Written and directed by Amy Seimetz who was part of the mumblecore indie horror movement of the teens responsible for that odd sub-genre films that all starred AJ Bowen. She is back, with some familiar faces for her second solo feature outing that has her dropping the heavy dialog and taking to a highly visual and existential approach to a film that […]

FAMILY ROMANCE, LLC (directed by Werner Herzog, 89 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Family Romance, LLC, which hit VOD last week, is the latest by Werner Herzog and has the director taking a fictional narrative that detours into documentary-like style vignettes. The film, which was shot in Japan with Japanese dialog, is inspired by a very real business where you can rent stand-in family members for funerals or weddings or various other life events. Family Romance, LLC focuses on Ishii Yuichi, who at the the start of the film is hired to play the long lost father […]

BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC While we can all agree 2020 has been a pretty terrible year, the films that have come out thus far actually have actually been pretty good. Because Hollywood’s blockbusters have been sidelined until further notice, smaller, quirkier films — which would ordinarily be trampled under foot by the marketing juggernaut of Big Hollywood tentpoles and superhero franchises — have been given a chance to shine. Here’s my list of the best films released in the first half of 2020 and currently streaming. Hopefully these films will offer a welcome distraction in these dark and dire […]

FIRST COW (directed Kelly Reichardt, 122 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Directed by Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women, Night Moves), First Cow is the story of a cook named Cookie (John Magaro) and a migrant Chinese laborer named King Lu (Orion Lee) set in the newly settled Oregon Territory circa 1820. After a chance meeting one night, when Cookie comes across King naked and on the run in the forest and Cookie provides the stranger with both clothes and provisions Good Samaritan-style, they meet again some months later in a small town where they begin an Odd Couple-esque […]

HAMILTON (directed by Thomas Kail, 180 minutes, USA, 2020) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Originally planned for a fall 2021 release, it’s hard to see Disney’s move to drop the Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning musical Hamilton on their proprietary platform FREE to subscribers on July 3rd as anything less than a response to current events. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip hop musical about the life of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton tapped into the politico/sociocultural zeitgeist, generating the kind of rabid fandom usually reserved for things like Marvel or Star Wars. After a bidding war, Disney copped the theatrical rights to the […]