SKYFALL (2012, directed Sam Mendes, 143 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Hard to believe such a specific fantasy can maintain itself for 50 years, but secret agent “Bond, James Bond” returns, Aston Martin, shaken-not-stirred, twangy theme song and all. Skyfall, the 23rd official Bond film, makes a point of hitting every little cliché from the original series but this time it seems oddly fitting. With its apocalyptic showdown with the MI6 and an unexpected look at the roots of our trained killer, Skyfall feels like a final farewell to the character who has defined blockbuster action films […]

  BY DAN BUSKIRK It’s the last weekend of the Philadelphia Film Festival, whose films stretch on through its closing this Sunday night. In my overview. there was a shocking lack of lowlights. While the festival has cut the number films to nearly a third of the massive number that played in its pre-crash years, it seems like the ratio of excellence in their selection has gone through the roof. I was a little underwhelmed by David Chase’s Not Fade Away. It had all the great character detail you loved from Chase’s The Sopranos (including Tony Soprano himself, James Gandolfini […]

Hyde Park On Hudson, starring Bill Murray as F.D.R. and Laura Linney as Eleanor, screens 7:30 PM Thursday @ The Prince BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It is time for the 21st annual Philadelphia Film Festival, delivering a slate of over one hundred films from around the country and around the world, from now until October 28th . It used to be that critics could gorge on piles of advance DVD screeners of films playing the festival. This year, advance screening opportunities are oddly curtailed, giving us just a handful of films on which to report. Some of the festival […]

  BY JESSE LUNDY LED ZEP CORRESPONDENT So I’ve been looking forward to going to see the Led Zeppelin movie Celebration Day since I saw that it was going to be playing in Philadelphia. I broke my rule of never stepping foot into the Riverview Theater on Delaware Ave–recently reviewed by Albert Y. on citysearch.com as “The absolutely worst place you can ever imagine you could go to attempt to watch a movie.” I did it for the Zep. When I got there, about 75 people were already in the theater. Lots of graybeard classic-rock looking dudes who surely fought […]

NEW YORKER: The new Ben Affleck movie, “Argo,” begins in November, 1979, with the storming of the American Embassy in Tehran. A crowd breaks into the compound, taking more than fifty Americans hostage. Six escape through the back of the building and take refuge in the residence of the Canadian Ambassador. How can they be spirited out of the country, or, as the jargon puts it, exfiltrated? Back in Washington, the task falls to a C.I.A. staffer named Tony Mendez (played by Affleck), from the Office of Technical Services. Various plans have been mooted, the most credible being that the […]

  V/H/S (2012, directed by Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Gen McQuade, Joe Swanberg, and Radio Silence, 115 minutes, U.S.) SLAUGHTER TALES (2012, directed by Johnny Dickie, 90 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC There was an uncomfortable silence leaving the press screening of the new horror anthology V/H/S, one I couldn’t help breaking with a brief capsule review. “A little rape-y, no?” Slight nervous laughter ensued. V/H/S brings together a group of like-minded young filmmakers each adding a “found-footage” horror short to this collection of solidly spooky mayhem.  Ti West is probably the most acclaimed of the […]

Artwork by MARTIN ANSIN LOOPER (2012, directed by Rian Johnson, 118 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Looper, the new sci-fi film by writer/director Rian Johnson (Brick, The Brothers Bloom) starts out with a fatal unforced error. It’s the make-up applied to the eyes, nose, and jaw of its star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a ham-fisted stab at trying to make the actor resemble a younger version of Bruce Willis, who plays the same character in the film 30 years older. Right from the start this comes across as a preposterous and needlessly distracting decision. With the last Batman film and […]

Photo by TGBUSILL PHILLY POST: According to John Ciccone, the Roxy’s landlord (he also owns the neighboring Adrienne Theater), he has given current operator Bernard Neary until November 7th to vacate. “But I’ve asked him to vacate earlier and have given him conditions that would make it attractive for him to do so,” says Ciccone, adding that the Roxy could close as soon as Monday, “or even tonight.” Ciccone says that he wants the Roxy “to be more” and to show art house and repertory films like it used to but to also upgrade to digital projectors to keep up […]

  THE MASTER (2012, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 137 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC For the first half-hour of Paul Thomas Anderson’s riveting new film The Master we watch the shell-shocked WW II vet Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) as his life sinks lower and lower into the mire of his own pathology. From soldier, to department store photographer, and finally chased off of the cabbage fields where he slaves along anonymously, Freddie keeps pace with the steamroller of a century the best that he can. When he sneaks aboard a yacht piloted by the august Lancaster Dodd […]