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 […]

PREVIOUSLY: Near the end of The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson’s storybook cinematic fable of wasted potential, the character of Richie, a disgraced world-class tennis player with a dark secret, looks soulfully into the bathroom mirror. It’s impossible to say what he’s thinking–he looks scared, confused, angry, on the verge. A tensely strummed acoustic guitar spirals in the background, accompanying a hushed, faintly ominous vocal. It’s Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay.” Richie picks up a scissors and methodically, if crudely, crops his shoulder-length tresses down to the scalp. He lathers up his lumberjack beard and shaves it clean. He stares […]

  ZERO DARK THIRTY (2012, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, 157 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I find myself in stone disbelief over a few of the things Hollywood is telling itself about three of the season’s high profile films: 1. The Hobbit’s “high-frame rate” process is preferable to film. 2. Django Unchained has important things to say about race and slavery. 3. Zero Dark Thirty is an apolitical look at C.I.A. torture and the capture of Osama bin Laden. It was surprising to hear so many characterize a film filled with sympathetic, good-looking actors carrying out a G-rated […]

GANGSTER SQUAD (2013, directed by Ruben Fleischer, 113 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I’ve never been one to adopt the cry that stamping out violent media is the cure for reducing troubling crime rates but I’ve seen few films that seem as beholden to gun-culture fetishism than the would-be epic Gangster Squad. A lot of bullets fly in this paper-thin distillation of every gangster movie ever made, and while it is hard to imagine this film inspiring anything more than dismay, the film serves as a holy document of our nation’s absurd belief in the curative powers of […]

  BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It might come as no surprise to see The Master on a Best of 2012 list, but it is a surprise to me, someone who has always found Paul Thomas Anderson films to display a lot of craft masking simplistic or vague ideas. Exploring an odd, symbiotic relationship between religious charlatan and a shell-shocked ex-G.I. addict, Anderson’s latest is the most intimate of epics, a film that attempts to tell the story of the 20th century while most of its scenes take place in small rooms. The Master itself is not overloaded with action and Anderson seems less interested […]

  PROMISED LAND (2012, directed by Gus Van Sant, 106 minutes, U.S.) NOT FADE AWAY (2012, directed by David Chase, 112 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Matt Damon and John Kasinski co-wrote/co-produced and co-star in Promised Land, an “issue drama” that seems Hell-bent on allowing its flat-footed attempt at drama get by on its good-intentions alone. Based on a story idea by fellow do-gooder Dave Eggers, Promised Land aches of being a film whose anti-fracking message came long before they decided on a story to hang it on. Damon is Steve Butler, a servant of an energy company […]