SPRING BREAKERS (2012, directed by Harmony Korine, 94 minutes, U.S.) UPSIDE DOWN (2012, Juan Solanas, 100 minutes, Canada/France) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Comedian D.L. Hughley was on Real Time with Bill Maher a few years back, talking about the seductive fantasy of your standard issue rap video: a picture of convertible sports cars, hot tubs and rippling seas of bouncing booty. As successful as Hughley has been, he admitted those videos even made him feel like life might be passing him by. That fantasy idyll of compliant, scantily-clad young females, drinks a-flowing, and tunes a-blasting is a vision […]

  STOKER (2013, directed by Chan-wook Park, 98 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Few cinematic events this year were as titillating as the arrival of South Korean director Chan-wook Park on American shores, where the merciless creator of hard-hitting thrillers like Oldboy and Thirst has made his first English language film, Stoker. Park’s work has been so masterfully constructed up to now, a worried mind might travel back 20 years ago, when director John Woo capped off his string of action masterpieces with a drab misfire, Hard Target with Jean-Claude Van Damme. Co-produced by the Scott brothers, Ridley […]

  SALON:  Sam Raimi’s gazillion-dollar prequel to “The Wizard of Oz” features gorgeous production design – liberally quoting and pilfering from the beloved 1939 original – dazzling costumes (many of them draped on Rachel Weisz) and explosive, imaginative special effects. You can feel its good intentions, even when Michelle Williams isn’t on screen, glowing with the ethereal, saintly blondness of Glinda the Good Witch. Raimi and his collaborators have made an honest effort to capture the family-movie spirit of old Hollywood, while updating the action and humor to more contemporary standards. But saying that Raimi’s trip to Oz is adequate […]

VANITY FAIR: John Travolta was at that time as cold as they get,” says Mike Simpson, Tarantino’s agent at William Morris Endeavor. “He was less than zero.” Marred by a series of commercially successful but creatively stifling movies, culminating in the talking-baby series, Look Who’s Talking, Travolta’s career seemed past saving. So, when he was told that Tarantino wanted to meet with him, he went to the director’s address, on Crescent Heights Boulevard. Tarantino recalls, “I open the door, and he says, ‘O.K., let me describe your apartment to you. Your bathroom has this kind of tile, and da-da-da-da. The […]

ROLLING STONE: Loosely based on the life of folk icon Dave Van Ronk, Inside Llewyn Davis follows Oscar Isaac as Llewyn Davis, a struggling, aspiring musician living in Greenwich Village at the height of folk scene in the 1960s. Aptly set to Bob Dylan‘s “Farewell,” the trailer shows Davis puttering and playing around the city, absorbing snarky insults from John Goodman and getting a vicious lesson on safe sex from love interest Jean Berkey, played by Carey Mulligan. MORE

  THE GUARDIAN: “[This] is not a traditional rock biopic [because] no one dies at the end,” producer Egoli Tossell said. Tentatively titled Lust for Life, Range’s film will explore the period when Pop and Bowie had relocated to Germany, collaborating on 1977’s Low and the Stooges leader’s first two solo albums. It’s an era that Bowie himself has recently returned to, paying tribute to Potsdamer Platz and Nürnberger Strasse in his new single. “Berlin was the first time in years that I had felt a joy of life and a great feeling of release and healing,” Bowie told Uncut […]

  SIDE EFFECTS (2013, directed by Steven Soderbergh, 106 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC One of our most frustrating filmmakers, Steven Soderbergh returns with another distressingly confounding work. With Side Effects he sends a medicated heroine into exciting unmined territory, and in a change of tone as scattershot as any Tyler Perry movie, he steers the film directly into a typhoon of ludicrous of Hollywood thriller cliches. With great filmmakers, even their misfires can be seen as understandable consequences of an intelligent risk that didn’t pay off. While Soderbergh’s best work (and I’d single out recent works like […]

  WEST OF MEMPHIS (2012, Dir. by Amy Berg, 140 minutes U.S.) BY MIKE WALSH For West Memphis 3 (WM3) groupies, the new documentary West of Memphis won’t add to your knowledge of the case. If you’ve read the books and seen the excellent HBO Paradise Lost documentaries, you know almost all of what’s covered in West of Memphis. It contains no new revelations, but it does contain a good deal of video you haven’t seen. So see this new documentary, which you’ll thoroughly enjoy. It will have you hyperventilating with rage at the injustice all over again. But if […]

  NEW YORK TIMES: It is hardly an uncritical account of Mr. Koch’s dozen years as mayor, but time has a way of turning the furious political battles of the past into amusing war stories, and of softening old enmities. Politicians, civic leaders and journalists who were thorns in Mr. Koch’s side offer measured, even affectionate assessments of his administration, though some hard feelings persist, especially on matters of race. In the film Mr. Koch himself, who died at 88 on Friday, seems to have mellowed very little. New York may be a safer, cleaner and less argumentative place than […]

  NEW YORK MAGAZINE:  [Side Effects] is an old-school nail-biter, not a diatribe on anti­depressants, drug companies, and psychotherapy. Still, it takes a pretty dim view of all of those things. STEVEN SODERBERG: I think if you were to talk to Dr. Sasha Bardey, an adviser on the film, he would tell you that there’s a place for ­SSRIs, but there’s no question that a lot of people are looking for the shortcut. He would also say a combination of prescription meds and therapy can help people who are in a really bad way, but that there’s a difference between […]

  On Wednesday, January 23, 2013, the Secret Cinema returns to The Trestle Inn, the popular “Whiskey and Go Go” nightspot in Philadelphia’s emerging “loft district.” On that night we’ll again revisit a favorite Secret Cinema program concept: EXOTICA MUSIC FILMS. This new collection of ultra-rare footage from a variety of sources — including lost TV shows, theatrical shorts, industrial and educational films, and film jukeboxes of the 1940s — offers a chance to hear, and see, a wondrous assortment of international music (both authentic and gloriously fake), from a carefree, boozy time, before David Byrne rendered “World Music” a […]

  NEW YORK TIMES: Brett Easton Ellis is noticeably absent, holed up less than a mile away waging one of his frequent Twitter wars. (He has mounted social-media jihads against David Foster Wallace, J. D. Salinger and Kathryn Bigelow.) He thinks Lohan is wrong for the part, especially if she’s cast opposite the porn star he courted online. But he spent all his capital getting his man cast. Also, his condo is under water. Ellis will give in. Schrader, Pope and Lohan talk details. The film, “The Canyons,” has a microbudget, maybe $250,000. Ellis, Pope and Schrader are putting up […]