THE CONSPIRATOR (2010, directed by Robert Redford, 123 minutes, U.S.) IN A BETTER WORLD (2010, directed by Susanne Bier, 113 minutes, Denmark) POTICHE (2010, directed by Francois Ozon, 103 minutes, France) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Even though he never appears on-screen, it’s hard not to think about The Conspirator‘s director, Robert Redford, while his new film unspools. Besides playing nothing but earnest, handsome heroes in his career, he is admired by many for his Liberal activism and founding of the Sundance Film Festival, a festival lauded for its support of independent film. Yes, the man’s philanthropy and good intentions […]

The Ward (2010, directed by John Carpenter, 88 minutes,, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC John Carpenter, director of such genre classics as Halloween, Escape from New York, and the soon-to-be revamped The Thing, is the big guest at this year’s Cinefest. He’ll be receiving the Phantasmagoria Award at an event Monday night at the Troc, where he’ll be interviewed via Skype along with a screening of his 1986 cult favorite Big Trouble in Little China. Carpenter’s films aren’t strongly driven by any auteurist obsessions but he has directed a long run of genre films full of intelligence and original […]

SOURCE CODE (2011, directed by Duncan Jones, 93 minutes, U.S.) CERTIFIED COPY (2010, directed by Abbas Kiarostami, 106 minutes, France/Italy) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I thought I knew who Duncan Jones was. His biography fit the story so well, of course the son of David Bowie, once known as “Zowie Bowie,” would reveal himself to be a science fiction director distracted by ideas of identity, much like his father who so famously shifted between personas. His 2009 debut Moon, was the quintessential “promising debut;” a low-budget throwback to a science fiction of ideas and not mere spectacle, telling the […]

SALON: Gunn has described “Super” as an adaptation of William James’ “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” complete with superhero costumes and comic violence, and he’s not kidding about that nearly as much as you’d think. Another way of translating it might be to say that Gunn has taken the loser-hipster characters from “Ghost World” and transported them into the splatterific, grade-C genre universe of Troma Films. “Super” stars Rainn Wilson (best known as Dwight from TV’s “The Office”) as Frank, a hapless fry cook in some nameless, R. Crumb-style Middle American city. […] [A] divine intervention leads Frank to buy […]

The critically acclaimed cinematic concert rockumentary, The Grateful Dead Movie Event will take audiences back to the ‘70s for a one-night in-theater event on Wednesday, April 20 at 7:30 p.m. at the Riverview and University City 6. Under the direction of the band’s lead guitarist Jerry Garcia and co-directed by Leon Gast, these legendary 1974 concerts capture the Grateful Dead at the pinnacle of their psychedelic worldwide fame while documenting the Dead Head experience. During this NCM Fathom event, theater audiences will be the first to see exclusive, never-before-seen interviews with both Garcia and Bob Weir that were captured during […]

BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC One of the most memorable moments in Super Bowl commercial history came in 1996, when we watched a spaceship blow up the White House in an ad for the forthcoming summer blockbuster, Independence Day. The commercial caused quite a stir; we had imagined an impregnable wall around the U.S. and it was deeply shocking to see that wall breached. That was 15 years ago, and although we are engaged in at least two wars, the only sustained attack on the U.S. we can imagine is the fantasy scenario that monsters could come from outer space […]

BY REBECCA GOODACRE This week The King’s Speech won the Oscar for best picture, and, as is tradition critics set about analyzing the whys and wherefores of its success.  Was it just another extension of America’s captivation with British royalty and all that palace and crown jewels malarkey?  And how do us Brit’s feel about something so homegrown winning big? Upon seeing The King’s Speech my first reaction was just of ‘Thank fucking god Colin Firth isn’t playing yet another doddering nice-guy in a British rom-com.’  But after that initial relief, some deep-seated British guilt set in; shouldn’t this really […]

After a yearlong hiatus due to lack of funds and internal rifts, Philadelphia Cinefest is back, and promises more festival hoopla than ever before. From April 7th-14th, somewhere between 60-75 feature films will be screened at a number of Philadelphia venues, including the Ritz, the Trocadero, the Painted Bride, and the Piazza. Josh Goldbloom, (who also runs the Philadelphia Underground Film Festival) took over as art director for this year’s Cinefest. His goal: to structure a themed party around every single feature. Goldbloom said, “We’re really focused on getting a community together, based around film […] we could turn this […]

The Unknown Japan film series, which specializes in showcasing obscurities unseen by American audiences, continues tonight at the Belleview. Tonight’s free screening is 1982’s High-Teen Boogie, an adolescent melodrama that serves as a vehicle for the eighteen year-old Masahiko Kond?, who was apparently the Japanese Justin Bieber of his time. In a story designed to make teen girls quiver and melt, Masahiko plays Shou, the wayward leader of a motorcycle gang who gives up his bad boy ways when he falls in love with the dour good-girl Momoko (Kumiko Takeda). You might think that a romantic comedy would be the […]

Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 comedy, Smiles of a Summer Night is screening this Saturday at the International House. It was the first of Bergman’s films to receive international acclaim, and was followed by The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. Set in the turn-of-the-century, the film follows four couples exchanging flirtations, promises and partners throughout the course of a chimerical, dimly-lit Scandinavian night. In line with the rest of Bergman’s oeuvre, the film poignantly captures masculine/feminine quips and quarrels with humor and sadness — the banter and witticisms are still spot-on, despite the film’s being over half of a century […]