FOXCATCHER (2014, directed by Bennett Miller, 130 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK It’s hard to live in the state of Delaware and not say the name “DuPont” every day or two. Highways, hospitals, chemical plants and state parks all carry the name. In fact, the DuPonts own their home state in a way that few old money families can claim. Residents of Delaware have made peace living in the shadow of these modern day Dukes and Duchesses but there was something unnerving to discover in 1986 that the DuPont name had been affixed to homicide. The news broke that […]
RIP: Mike Nichols, Creator Of Much Of The Greatest Cinema, Theater & Comedy Of The 20th Century
NEW YORK TIMES: Mike Nichols, one of America’s most celebrated directors, whose long, protean résumé of critic- and crowd-pleasing work earned him adulation both on Broadway and in Hollywood, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 83. Dryly urbane, Mr. Nichols had a gift for communicating with actors and a keen comic timing, which he honed early in his career as half of the popular sketch-comedy team Nichols and May. An immigrant whose work was marked by trenchant perceptions of American culture, he achieved — in films like “The Graduate,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Carnal Knowledge” and […]
CINEMA: Black Hole Son
INTERSTELLAR (2014, directed Christopher Nolan, 169 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC No hyperbole has been spared on the arrival of writer/director Christopher Nolan’s new sci-fi epic Interstellar. Like all of Nolan’s recent films, Interstellar triggers an intimidating sense of immense scale, and once again Nolan has delivered a film whose captivating performances and clever design are offset by hose-blasts of sentimentality, self-important bloat and a disagreeable undercurrent of Ayn Rand-ian self-pity. Plus, wise-cracking robots! The dystopic near-future America of the film’s opening is certainly thought-provoking. From the vantage point of the Cooper family’s rural farm we see a […]
CINEMA: Interstellar Overdrive
Illustration by CHRIS B. MURRAY NEW YORKER: Interstellar, an outer-space survivalist epic created by the director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay, is ardently, even fervently incomprehensible, a movie designed to separate the civilians from the geeks, with the geeks apparently the target audience. Nolan’s 2010 movie, “Inception,” offered layers of dreaming consciousness, each outfitted with its own style of action. The film was stunning but meaningless—a postmodern machine, with many moving parts, dedicated to its own workings and little else. In “Interstellar,” however, Nolan goes for a master narrative. Like so many recent […]
CINEMA: Night Moves
NIGHTCRAWLER (2014, directed by Dan Gilroy, 117 minutes, U.S.) THE GUEST (2014, directed by Adam Wingard, 99 minutes, U.S.) BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP (2014, directed by Rowan Joffe, 92 minutes, U.K.) HORNS (2013, directed by Alexandre Aja, 120 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC A new financial reality has hit Hollywood as the range of films they once made has seemingly tightened. Of course we know they’re funding gargantuan super hero films and CGI-driven blockbusters but further down the budget ladder are modest action films with middle-aged stars, relatively inexpensive youth comedies and low budget horror films. […]
CINEMA: Wings Of Desire
BIRDMAN (OR THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE (2014, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, 119 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Birdman would appear to be the most acclaimed film of the year and it is easy to be swept up as its backstage drama takes flight. This sort of behind-the-curtains look at the world of theater has a long history in the world of small scale art films but director Alejando González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) juices up the precedings with a modern blockbuster dynamism and creates a film that is unlike much else we’ve seen in modern […]
CINEMA: Even Better Than The Real Thing
Art And Craft, which opens at the Ritz At The Bourse on tomorrow, follows the monkeyshines of eccentric self-described “philanthropist” and “art collector” Mark Landis, who donates famous works from his collection to museums around the country that could never afford to purchase them. Unbeknownst to the museums is the fact that all the works are actually forgeries — forgeries Landis created with his own two hands. In fact, Landis is considered the most prolific art forger of all time. Eventually Matthew Leininger, then a staffer at the Cincinnati Museum Of Art, discovers the ruse and begins tracking Landis […]
CINEMA: The Jazz Nazi
WHIPLASH (2014, Damien Chazelle, 109 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK Whiplash is a skilled filmization of a preposterous argument. Set in the cutthroat world of a music school jazz band writer/director Damien Chazelle’s breakout feature follows a drummer as he locks horns with an unhinged drill instructor of a music professor. Whiplash occasionally thrills with some expertly-edited big band performances but I never got so whipped up that I shook the horror I felt at the film’s attitudes toward jazz music, education and humanity in general. As a jazz fan I knew we were in trouble when it revealed […]
CINEMA: The Killing Fields
FURY (2014, directed by David Ayer, 134 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC War films are most interesting not just for the stories they tell but for the insight they offer into contemporary attitudes towards war. Former Navy officer David Ayer writes and directs the new WW2 thriller Fury and his story is determined to show us that the best thing about going to war is to reveal what a man can achieve once he allows himself to be dehumanized. It’s an attitude missing from the WW2 Hollywood propaganda films of the 1940s and certainly different from the […]
CINEMA: Elephant’s Memory
Tonight at the PHS Pop Up Garden, the Philadelphia Film Festival, in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Academy Of The Fine Arts, will present a free screening of The Elephant Man, directed by David Lynch and starring Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt. The film begins at sundown.
I SEE A DARKNESS: Twin Peaks 24 Years After
EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally posted on September 23rd, 2011. BY MIKE WALSH Like millions of Americans, I was fanatical about Twin Peaks when the show originally aired on ABC in 1990. I rearranged my schedule, so I could be home to watch it. I recorded it on VHS tape when I couldn’t. I debated the identity of Laura Palmer’s murderer with friends and strangers. I had dreams about Bob, the malevolent demon that haunts the show. So when Netflix made Twin Peaks available for streaming recently, I immediately added it to my queue. I started watching in August and every […]
BLUE JEANS AND MOON BEAMS: The Early Word On Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice
WALL STREET JOURNAL: One film, two masters. That’s the easiest, most direct way to describe the power behind “Inherent Vice,” the much-anticipated stoner noir film that had its world premiere Saturday night as the centerpiece of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. The film is loaded with all sorts of familiar Hollywood faces, but the biggest stars of the project are its director and screenwriter, celebrated auteur Paul Thomas Anderson, and the author whose novel served as source material, great American novelist Thomas Pynchon. The two were the buzz of the red carpet Saturday night, even as the likes of stars Joaquin Phoenix, Josh […]
CINEMA: Gone, Daddy, Gone
GONE GIRL (2014, directed by David Fincher, 149 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC At the opening of director David Fincher’s new adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s best-selling thriller, Nick Dunne looks at his sleeping wife Amy while his voice-over wonders what’s going in in that noggin of hers. It takes us almost two-and-a-half hours to answer that question and although Gone Girl is a sometimes-diverting Hollywood thriller the questions that linger center on the once-rising career of Mr. Fincher. Is this sort of gussied-up Lifetime Network potboiler really worthy of one of Hollywood’s most-talented directors? With Gone Girl […]