SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN (2012, directed by Malilk Bendjelloul, Sweden/U.K.) HOPE SPRINGS (2012, directed by David Frankel, 100 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I remember the first time I heard “Sugar Man,” the signature song by 60’s missing link/Latino Donovan doppelganger Rodriguez. I was in a record store about five years ago, and Rodriguez’s plaintive, pleading voice singing the title over the Spanish guitar stopped me in my tracks. This song didn’t sound like a mere hit, it sounded like a classic, and the album it comes from, 1970’s Cold Fact shows a fully-developed artist in mid-flight. […]

CARNY (1980, dir. by Robert Kaylor, 107 minutes U.S.) GIRL ON THE RUN (1953, dir. by Arthur J. Beckhard & Joseph Lee, 64 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK Step Right Up! The summer is here and what better time to savor this duo of films, both taking us deep inside the American traveling carnival tradition. With their lurid theatricality, carnivals are such perfect cinematic settings it is surprising the “Carny Film” isn’t more of a full-blown genre (though let’s give a shout-out to such carny classics as the unmentionable Freaks, Nightmare Alley – Tyrone Power, forced to bite the head […]

  TOTAL RECALL (2012, directed by Len Wiseman, 118 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It’s August, historically the time when Hollywood sends its most underachieving blockbusters into theaters. That would make 2012’s Total Recall perfectly suited for the season, a remake of the least impressive of the three dystopic sci-fi films directed in Hollywood by Dutch director Paul Verhoeven. Is it a good movie? Not in any conventional sense, the film doesn’t even scale the modest heights of the original. Yet in the easy-going nature August, the film does offer a handful of well-mounted action scenes, some fun […]

  NEIL YOUNG JOURNEYS (2011, directed by Jonathan Demme, 87 minutes, U.S.) POSSESSION (1981, directed by Andrzej ?u?awski, 123 minutes, France/West Germany) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC On paper, Jonathan Demme directing a new Neil Young music doc seemed predictable if not redundant —  another music documentary from the man who has chronicled The Talking Heads, Robyn Hitchcock, and Springsteen, no to mention his third film with Young, having previously lensed him during a string of Nashville concerts in the 2006 film, Neil Young: Heart of Gold and in 2009 with his rock band in Neil Young Trunk Show. Now […]

  THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012, directed by Christopher Nolan, 164 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC When word came that director Christopher Nolan was filming the latest installment of the Batman franchise amidst the Occupy protests outside of Wall Street last fall, the mind reeled. The best blockbusters, and that surely includes Nolan’s own entries into the genre, have found a way to divine the hopes and fears of our national id, because how else are you going to charm hundreds and millions of dollars from the public anyway? With the national narrative of the 2008 financial collapse still […]

  Savages (2012, Directed by Oliver Stone, 131 minutes, US) Any fan of Oliver Stone knows that he likes to juxtapose the dark side of human nature with the more altruistic side of our makeup.  His newest effort, Savages, harkens back to the stark violence of Natural Born Killers but this time the brutality is tempered with a touch of Buddhist philosophy (Stone is a Buddhist, FYI), and the addition of a small measure of morality into some of the characters’ dispositions.   Set in the idyllic California town of Laguna Beach, the plot focuses on drug entrepreneurs Ben (Aaron Johnson) […]

  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 […]