SNOWPIERCER (2013, directed by Boon Joon-ho, 126 minutes, South Korea) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Writing about current film, I worry I spend too much time bemoaning the state of the Hollywood blockbuster, a sizable section of cinema I sometimes feel I should abandon altogether. What does summer boredom look like? Every other Joe is a super hero, every trailer reveals rebooted nostalgia and the sight of city skylines crumbling to the ground has become as old hat as cowboys dueling on a dusty Main Street. But it is hard to let the special-effects epic go. I was a […]

This looks promising. Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader are twin siblings navigating an awkward reunion after a 10-year estrangement. Wiig is quirky and conflicted — big stretch, right? — and Hader is gay and bitchy-but-funny, sorta like Stefon when he goes home to Long Island for Christmas and has to put the flaming party monster persona on ice for a few days. Co-starring Luke Wilson as Wiig’s ever-patient bo-hunk love interest. Some bad ’80s dreck lip-synching required. In the hands of any other actors this premise would be insufferable. It comes out September 19th. Can’t wait to see it.

  THE IMMIGRANT (2013, directed by James Gray, 120 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Director James Gray’s new film The Immigrant has the whiff of classic to it, perhaps because watching fresh-faced lovelies fall prey to exploitation has been the stuff of great cinema since Lilian Gish first wilted for D.W. Griffith. With the gifted French actress Marion Cotillard at his disposal, Gray works up a lot of steam in this Ellis Island historical piece but he lacks the insight for character or the temperament for melodrama to make his dour little tale fire on all cylinders. Arriving […]

Looks quite promising. In theaters June 6th.

  WALL STREET JOURNAL: “Foxcatcher,” directed by Bennett Miller (“Moneyball,” “Capote”) examines the period when Du Pont invited and hosted the Schultz brothers, both Olympic gold medal wrestlers, to stay at his estate near Philadelphia and train a world-class wrestling team called “Team Foxcatcher.” Mark Ruffalo plays older brother David, and Channing Tatum is the impressionable younger brother, Mark. Miller follows the time they shared with Du Pont unflinchingly to its tragic end. MORE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: [John du Pont] looks like a shrimp compared to his powerfully built guest; he has pasty, colorless skin, a high, whiny voice and posture […]

  GODZILLA (2014, directed by Gareth Edwards, 123 minutes, U.S.) PALO ALTO (2013, directed by Gia Coppola, 100 minutes, U.S.) BLUE RUIN (2013, directed by Jeremy Salnier, 90 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC There has been bad news from Southern California in recent days. San Diego County has been hit with wildfires of a strength we’re not used to seeing so early in the fire season and don’t even get me started on the ‘firenadoes.’ Disturbing foreshadowing is also coming out of Hollywood, too, because badly misfiring summer blockbusters like Godzilla rarely arrive this early in the season […]

Artwork by GRACE O’CONNOR ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2013, directed by Jim Jarmusch, 123 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Adam and Eve, as played by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, channel a sweet strain of sublime melancholy as the aging couple in director Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. To describe this beautiful pair as an aging couple is not quite right; actually as vampires their bodies aren’t aging at all but together they possess a world-weariness born of observing centuries of man’s foolhardy ways. The two exist in a beautiful stasis, a state that Jarmusch milks for […]

  Trailer for Lance Bangs’ (Jackass, Thunder Ant) documentary about the then-tender-aged Louisville math-rock mystics known as Slint. The band’s 1991 masterwork Spiderland is the alpha and omega of indie-rock. It says the unsayable, it speaks the unspeakable. It is the first thing enlightened people reach for when fleeing a burning building or sinking ship. It is the last thing the astronauts left on the moon, which is why the moon has been off limits ever since*. The re-activated Slint will be playing Spiderland in its entirety at Union Transfer on Thursday May 1st. I pity the fool that misses […]

  TRICK BABY (1972, directed by Larry Yust, 89 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC This Thursday at 8:00pm Exhumed Films and the Cinedelphia Film Festival present one of the gems of the 1970s blaxploitation era, Larry Yust’s 1972 film Trick Baby. Shot extensively on the gritty streets of Philadelphia, Trick Baby doesn’t traffic in the exaggerated “super spade” clichés of the genre but instead functions as an exceptionally thoughtful street-level crime film following a pair of con men as their luck runs out. Based on Iceberg Slim’s second book, the follow-up to his black fiction classic “Pimp: The […]

  UNDER THE SKIN (2013, directed by Jonathan Glazer, 108 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC There’s a moment early on in Jonathan Glazer’s hallucinatory new film Under the Skin where Scarlett Johansson’s unnamed character plucks an ant from a lifeless body and inspects it indifferently. The fleeting scene sets the tone for this grimly hypnotizing little mood piece, as it invites us to study the young woman as she moves through her surreal rituals like a bug collecting its prey. Long on process and short on explanation, Under the Skin pulls us into its spell by eschewing formula […]

  THE RAID 2 (2014, directed by Gareth Evans, 150 min., Indonesia) NYMPHOMANIAC: VOLUME 2 (2013, directed by Lars Van Trier, 123 min., Denmark) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Director Gareth Evans’ 2012 film Raid: The Redemption was the freshest slab of action cinema to bloody-up the screen since the early ’90s heyday of John Woo. The film followed Rama (self-contained martial artist Iko Uwais) as a member of a SWAT team climbing the stairs of a high rise housing project in Jakarta to arrest the drug lord who living in the top floor suite. The team soon finds out […]