THE ARMSTRONG LIE (2013, directed by Alex Gibney, 122 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Alex Gibney’s latest documentary The Armstrong Lie seems bound to come and go quickly if only because its subject has already been road-tested as a giant fib no one wants to hear. Beating the French seven times at their own game and coming back from cancer even stronger, now that’s a story to promote and cheer. The real story, that Armstrong’s Tour de France wins were the product of shameless blood doping is a drag we would all like to forget. But Gibney hasn’t […]

  NEW YORKER: If you love the Coens, or follow folk music, or hold fast to this period of history and that patch of New York, then the film can hardly help striking a chord. Some of its joys are gleefully precise, like the quartet of white-sweatered harmonizing Irish crooners, or the novelty number “Please Mr. Kennedy,” which Llewyn, Jim, and Al Cody (Adam Driver) chant for Columbia Records. Yet something in the movie fails to grip, and it has to do with the hero. Bud Grossman, again, gets it right, telling him, “You’re no front man.” If that is […]

  JONATHAN VALANIA: Guitarist John Fahey — drifter, hermit, sorcerer — does for the blues, folk and other American primitive idioms what Duchamp did for nudes descending staircases: His sonic portraits never rely on blurry lines to illustrate the concentric circles of motion and being, managing to suggest the ancient, immediate and infinite all at once. Pretty heady stuff, and if the latter half of his 30-plus recordings sounds a little new age-y, well, you can’t blame him for the watery derivations his disciples managed to popularize. Though heralded as one of the great fingerstyle guitarists of the 20th century, […]

  THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (2013, directed by Francis Lawrence, 146 minutes, U.S.) DALLAS BUYER’S CLUB (2013, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, 117 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The dystopia thickens in the second installment of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. What’s ablaze in this chapter is the popularity of Katniss (current “It Girl” Jennifer Lawrence), the main character of the series who won the government’s murderous gladiator game in the first film by threatening double-suicide with her last opponent at the contest’s climax. This development made Katniss a reality TV star and an inspiration to the revolutionaries […]

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR (2013, Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, 179 minutes, France) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC A bracingly intimate look at the debilitating flames of first love, Blue is the Warmest Color captures the gravitational force of young passion when it becomes all-consuming. At three hours long, the winner of last year’s Palm d’Or immerses us so deeply into the world of the introverted Adele that at film’s end she feels like a person we know rather then a character we merely observed. The performances that Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche capture from his two female leads exude such […]

  BY HERB GREENE HORTICULTURE EDITOR Oregon was weird long before the Grateful Dead trucked up there in August of ’72 to play it’s legendary concert at the Old Renaissance Faire Grounds near Eugene. It was that same freak-nurturing frontier where a young Ken Kesey roamed and grazed before going on to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and later, as head administrator of the Acid Tests, foment the cultural upheaval that defined the era that Time-Warner has branded and sold as “The Sixties” a million times over. The concert, widely-regarded by most fans as the band’s greatest ever, […]

  12 YEARS A SLAVE (2013, directed by Steve McQueen, 134 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Just the mention of the title 12 Years A Slave has elicited groans when brought up in conversation; either the concept is too weighty, people feel the subject has been covered or they just can’t deal with the reality of American chattel slavery. Beyond the historical guilt and other political ramifications, British director Steve McQueen’s unforgettable exploration of the plantation life is one hell of a character study and a once in a lifetime role for one of our era’s most gifted […]

  THE COUNSELOR (2013, directed by Ridley Scott, 117 minutes, U.S.) CARRIE (2013, directed by Kimberly Peirce, 100 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy has written his first script specifically for the big screen and it’s a corker of a film noir, generically titled, The Counselor. With a star-strewn cast including Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt and Penelope Cruz, you’d expect this film to be heavily promoted, but instead The Counselor is slinking into town without press screenings like the venomous little scorpion that it is. All the elements of the classic film […]

  FILM WORKS: This beautiful and meditative Swiss documentary by Sophie Huber is an arty, non-chronological look at the work and philosophy of one of Hollywood’s greatest living actors (and enigmas) Harry Dean Stanton. Don’t expect to hear much else in the way of concrete biographical facts, as the star in question is pointedly vague about his background. When asked questions about what he believes or who he is, he responds humbly: “Nothing”. But as his personal assistant points out, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Having starred in over 250 films, Harry Dean is one of the hardest […]

  FRESH AIR: “We love being the country that freed the slaves,” says historian David Blight. But “we’re not so fond of being the country that had the biggest slave system on the planet…most Americans want their history to be essentially progressive and triumphal, they want it to be a pleasing story. And if you go back to this story, it’s not always going to please you, but it’s a story you have to work through to find your way to something more redemptive.” That’s why Blight was glad to see the new film 12 Years a Slave, an adaptation […]

DAVID EDELSTEIN: I gotta agree with budding film critic Julian Assange on this one: The Fifth Estate, which purports to depict the rise of the WikiLeaks founder, played by Benedict Cumberbatch and the momentous release of documents supplied by (then) Bradley Manning, is a feeble, reactionary drama. Director Bill Condon and screenwriter Josh Singer have decided to frame this as a saga of seduction and disillusionment. Daniel Berg (Daniel Bruhl) falls under the spell of Assange, exults in WikiLeaks’ cyberomnipotence, and then realizes that his charismatic leader is psychotically indifferent to the human cost of releasing government documents. (Assange won’t […]

  BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC PhilaMOCA continues to shine a light on some of the more obscure and fascinating corners of film with The Tele-Terror Fest, a five-day film festival of the TV movies of the 1970s. Presented by Exhumed Films and Cinedelphia, these 13 rare features represent some of the best-remembered thrillers of the telefilm genre, all shown from 16mm film prints. As TV gained strength as a medium, the networks began to produce their own exclusive feature length films. Among the first was a Technicolor musical version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin that was created by […]