TAKE THIS WALTZ (2011, directed by Sarah Polley, 116 minutes, Canada) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It has the generic trappings of a mainstream romantic comedy, but actress Sarah Polley’s second film as a writer/director exists in a plane beyond your typical Jennifer Aniston/Matthew McConaughey RomCom. Continuing the deeply-felt understanding of character she exhibited in her debut, the 2006 Alzheimer drama Away From Her, Polley further establishes herself as a young director to be reckoned with. Polley has been a particularly subtle actress since the ripe old age of nine, and the list of directors she has worked with […]

  THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (2012, directed by Marc Webb, 136 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I’m guessing it has been a decade or so since everybody started using the word “reboot” in place of “remake.” One of those marketing terms that slipped into everyday usage, it meant a new film wasn’t just a stale remake, it was newer, fresher, with old ideas reconsidered and completely re-imagined. Now, just a decade after the Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man series began dominating the blockbuster season with its trilogy of high-budgeted extravaganzas, people are saying “Spider-Man, a reboot already?” Nope. The Amazing Spider-Man […]

  When the country’s economy and sense of community was crumbling, one guy left everything behind to see if he could survive solely off the goodwill of America’s new town square: Craigslist. America is a wealthy, diverse and technologically sophisticated country – yet some say we’ve lost the sense of community that used to carry us through tough times. Today it’s every person for themselves. Have we become so caught up in our own lives that we don’t notice life outside of our bubble? 29-year-old filmmaker Joseph Garner decides to find out. He cuts himself off from everyone he knows […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Last week I  took issue with a judgement call that Phawker film critic Dan Buskirk made about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of a scene in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and voiced my disagreement in an editor’s note attached to Dan’s review. In the interest of fairness and equal time, I am running his response here. But first the passage in question from Dan’s review followed by the editor’s note I attached to it at the end. Here is the segment of Dan’s Moonrise Kindgom review in question:   Through all this gorgeously whimsical design, there’s one niggling fact, […]

MOONRISE KINGDOM (2012, Wes Anderson, 94 minutes, U.S.)?? BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Critic’s darling director Wes Anderson has, over the course of six films and change, honed a precious, man-child cinematic aesthetic that is the recognizable manifestation of a nerdy, never-ending adolescence. In modern times, the word “nerd” has been reclaimed as a badge of honor and we admire the studious for their ingenuity but Wes Anderson brings to mind a certain kind of nerd.  I’m getting a picture of the kind of awkward intense kid whose parents bankroll his basement project of recreating the whole town in 1/100th […]

PROMETHEUS (2012, directed by Ridley Scott, 124 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSIRK How Ridley Scott could’ve stayed away from sci-fi all these years is beyond me.  The 75-year-old director has had successes over the years, from his Oscar-winning Gladiator and his influential war flick Black Hawk Down, but nothing has stoked the eternal interest 1979’s Alien and 1982’s Blade Runner continue to enjoy.   With Prometheus, Scott returns not just to sci-fi but to his Alien franchise, which since its James Cameron-directed sequel in 1986 has floundered in the hands of mostly well-meaning directors who have failed to make something out […]

We Have a Pope (Habemus Papum) (Dir. by Nanni Moretti, 2011, Italian, 102 minutes) The latest film by independent Italian Director Nanni Moretti, We Have a Pope, is a lightweight farce that pokes fun at the isolated and archaic ways of the Roman Catholic Church but never manages to really open a crack to let the light of day shine on any of the more serious issues facing the institution in the modern world. The film opens with the venerable College of Cardinals filing quietly past the press to sequester themselves in conclave and elect a new Pontiff. During the […]

  BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I couldn’t be more delighted than to speak this Saturday June 2nd at an all-day event at the Princeton Public Library while screening a quartet of politically-themed films from Hollywood in the 1970s. The program was selected by a high school student from the Princeton area and is billed as “70s Cinema Fest For Teens” Much of my affection for these films stems from the fact that I was a cinema-obsessed teen when these film were first released. It was their seriousness of purpose that convinced me that “watching movies” could be more than […]

  THE GUARDIAN: There’s one great stroke of genius to Upside Down, Danny O’Connor’s chronicle of the birth, glory years and demise of mouthy mogul Alan McGee’s iconic record label. It’s the lack of a voiceover: O’Connor eschews traditional narration in favour of nuggets of rock’n’roll wisdom, spoken by ageing Irish DJ, music guru and McGee’s Death Disco co-conspirator BP Fallon (“purple-browed beep” in T Rex’s Telegram Sam). Fallon is shot in monochrome and beamed onto a grainy 50s TV set – a move that ensures the film stays in tune with the vibe of the bands Creation championed: amongst […]

  THE DICTATOR (2012, directed by Larry Charles, 83 minutes, U.S.) GOD BLESS AMERICA (2011. directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, 100 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC In Hollywood, no talent is too immense to be dragged to its knees for some mundane, sure-fire junk. After watching Ricky Gervais follow-up his classic TV work to labor in some distressingly formulaic comedies, we now have the immensely-gifted Sasha Baron Cohen starring in…a rom-com? After the genre-expanding fictional docu-comedies Borat and Bruno, Cohen’s fully-scripted new feature The Dictator finds the comic slipping from culture-jamming satirist to mere goofball comedian. The distance from […]