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 […]

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, […]