Bringing indie rock to its waterfront stage for the very first time, FringeArts announces an exciting addition to its spring 2014 calendar: the documentary film The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, directed and live-narrated by Academy Award-nominated director Sam Green; and accompanied by a score performed live on stage by legendary Hoboken band Yo La Tengo. FringeArts will host two showings of the The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller on First Friday, April 4, at 7 and 9 p.m. A special member pre-sale will begin on Feb. 27, and general tickets will be on sale March 1 at fringearts.com or […]

  THE PAST (2013, directed by Asghar Farhadi, 130 minutes, Iran/France) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Making a mystery out of everyday life, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s French-shot The Past quickly pulls us into a web of domestic intrigue. The family we meet is in severe dysfunction and at the root is an ever-looming past, an unspoken trauma whose role in which none of the characters truly understand. We arrive like Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) understanding very little. He has returned to Paris from Tehran after a four year absence to sign divorce papers and end his marriage with Marie (Argentine […]

  SALINGER (2013, directed by Shane Salerno, 129 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It’s a little hard to fathom the critical animosity this absorbing documentary on legendary writer J.D. Salinger has received, except to conclude that writers still feel the need to protect lonely old Holden Caufield. The notoriously reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye and Franny & Zooey didn’t leave behind a whole lot of evidence of his private life, but Salerno puts together the pieces to present the trajectory of a great fiction writer but he also paints an unflattering picture of a man whose […]

  HER (2013, directed by Spike Jonze, 125 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The movies have asked us to honor many unconventional romances —  men and mermaids, men and androids, young men and senior citizens, and women with monsters. Movies demand we suspend our disbelief and it is almost magical how we can project our emotions into such scenarios but Spike Jonze’s Her, which chronicles an affair between Joaquin Phoenix’s lonely Theodore and the voice on his phone, asks us to suspend our belief over what may be a romantic bridge too far. In a future that appears […]

Illustration by DREW FRIEDMAN SPY MAGAZINE: To artists and intellectuals, the twentieth century has posed no questions more vexing than these: First, can art make sense of the Holocaust? And second, why do the French love Jerry Lewis? The first question can’t really be answered, at least not in the space allotted here. As for the second, it’s my own opinion that the French have confused sloppy, uneven filmmaking with Godardian anti-formalism. Regardless, raising these two issues on the same page is not just a pointless exercise in non-sequitur. Because Jerry Lewis, like Elli Wiesel and Primo Levi before him […]

  More than 60 commercial and underground films dedicated to the sexual revolution will be presented in Free to Love: The Cinema of the Sexual Revolution, running Jan. 10 – Feb. 15, 2014, at International House Philadelphia’s Ibrahim Theater (3701 Chestnut St., Philadelphia; 215-387-5125), a resource for world-class avant-garde and repertory cinema since 1976. This expansive film series, which includes appearances and talks by several of the original filmmakers and influential film historians, explores the political and artistic tumult of the 1960s and ’70s and its effect on contemporary culture. The series is supported by a grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Free to Love: […]

  NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: There’s the subliminal hint given by Llewyn’s Welsh name, in addition to his blank-slate personality. Maybe the Coens really wanted to make an early-Dylan biopic but couldn’t—it would probably be impossible, at least right now, for a variety of reasons—and front-loaded the picture with Van Ronkiana to blur the traces. And perhaps it is this matter of cross purposes that leaves the movie feeling aimless. The story is no more than a rambling anecdote, Llewyn’s character undergoes no change for all that he experiences and endures, and to the extent that the picture has […]

  NEW YORKER: David O. Russell’s “American Hustle,” an intentionally overripe comedy about corruption, duplicity, loyalty, and love, is a series of astonishments. Russell, rewriting a script developed by Eric Singer, takes off from the Abscam affair—the bizarre criminal investigation of the nineteen-seventies in which the F.B.I. called on a swindler named Mel Weinberg to help ensnare public officials. (Six congressmen and a senator were among those ultimately convicted.) The bureau’s elaborate sting involved two “Arab sheikhs” (both F.B.I. employees) eager to invest in Atlantic City’s nascent casino industry and willing to bribe officials in order to procure operating licenses. […]

Photo by BRIGITTE LACOMBE NEW YORK MAGAZINE: Spike Jonze first emerged as a movie director as part of the “class of ’99,” making his debut in what turned out to be an epochal year that also saw breakthroughs for the Wachowskis, Kimberly Peirce, David O. Russell, Brad Bird, and Tom Tykwer, not to mention Jonze’s then-bride Sofia Coppola (the two married in 1999 and divorced in 2003). His contribution to the new-­generation vibe of that moment was particularly auspicious: After winning good reviews for his first major acting role, as a hayseed soldier in Russell’s acclaimed Three Kings, he arrived […]