TRUE GRIT (2010 directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, 110 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Every director who is in love with the history of movie making seems to have a desire to mount a classic Western, so it is more than a little surprising that it took the Coen Brothers twenty-six years and fifteen features to get around to it. With the cast and talent assembled, True Grit seemed like one of the few sure bets of the holiday season, and sure enough, it is a finely-detailed, confidently-plotted piece of old-fashioned entertainment. Part of the reason True […]

It’s a Wonderful Life Final Script Opening sequence/George saves Harry FADE IN –– NIGHT SEQUENCE Series of shots of various streets and buildings in the town of Bedford Falls, somewhere in New York State. The streets are deserted, and snow is falling. It is Christmas Eve. Over the above scenes we hear voices praying: GOWER’S VOICE: I owe everything to George Bailey. Help him, dear Father. MARTINI’S VOICE: Joseph, Jesus and Mary. Help my friend Mr. Bailey. MRS. BAILEY’S VOICE: Help my son George tonight. BERT’S VOICE: He never thinks about himself, God; that’s why he’s in trouble. ERNIE’S VOICE: […]

DAVID EDESTEIN: The Coens’ True Grit isn’t as momentous an event as you might hope, but once you adjust to its deliberate rhythms (it starts slowly), it’s a charming, deadpan Western comedy. It’s true that “charming” is an odd description for a picture with so much death and ghoulish imagery. But the Coens rarely get worked up about such things. Their gaze is steady, serene. Roger Deakins’s cinematography is beautifully deep-toned and austere; the compositions are clean even when the settings and characters are muddy. Hathaway shot the same old Arizona–New Mexico buttes we know from other John Wayne movies, […]

BLACK SWAN (2010, directed by Darren Aronofsky, 108 minutes, U.S.)   BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC   They say if things are going well at the job, you can stand friction at home, and if things are good at home you can stand friction at the job. But if there is stress at both work and home, well, that’s when people crack. In Darren Aronofsky’s latest film Black Swan, Nina Sayers, the Swan Queen at the center of a new production of the ballet Swan Lake, finds that neither work nor home is a sanctuary. As the stress builds, Aronfsky’s […]

NIGHT CATCHES US (2010, directed by Tanya Hamilton, 90 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The most unusual thing about the new locally-shot drama opening today, Night Catches Us, is its setting: northwest Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood in the year 1976. An African American enclave, this inner city setting in is not the concrete jungle most would associate with northern U.S. cities but a sprawling woodsy landscape offset by old stone and brick businesses and homes. Night Catches Us is the rare African America drama unconcerned with religion or drug-toting gangsters but it is instead a clever disguise for a […]

Coming early 2011.

NEW YORK TIMES: The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and the Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis, above, met on Friday in Springfield, Ill., to tour several historical sites, including the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, the Lincoln home, the Old State Capitol and the Lincoln-Herndon Law Offices, The State Journal-Register reported. Mr. Day-Lewis was preparing for the title role in “Lincoln,” a DreamWorks film to be directed by Steven Spielberg that is scheduled to begin production next fall, according to Kathleen Kennedy, who is producing the film with Mr. Spielberg. The screenplay, by Tony Kushner, who won a Pulitzer […]

127 HOURS (2010, directed by Danny Boyle, 94 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Danny Boyle, director of Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting, started directing back in the mid eighties, when all that restless, visual razzle-dazzle was bleeding over from the world of music videos. It has remained the defining element of Boyle’s style, keeping his ideas concise while the camera work is dependably witty and creative. Hitchcock, another British director known for his genius with kinetic movement, gave himself self-imposed limitations to challenge his roving camera in both Rope and Lifeboat, where his story remained bound to a single […]

dir. Federico Fellini, Italy, 1954, 35mm, 108 mins, b/w, Italian w/ English subtitles There has never been a face quite like that of Giulietta Masina. Her husband, the legendary Federico Fellini, directs her as Gelsomina in La strada, the film that launched them both into international stardom. Gelsomina is sold by her mother into the employ of Zampano (Anthony Quinn), a brutal strongman in a traveling circus. When Zampano encounters an old rival in highwire artist II Matto (Richard  Basehart), his fury is provoked to its breaking point. With La strada, Fellini left behind the familiar signposts of Italian neorealism […]

CLIENT 9: THE RISE AND FALL OF ELIOT SPITZER (2010, directed by Alex Gibney, 117 minutes, U.S.) COOL IT! (2010, directed Ondi Timoner, 92 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The last decade has seen art houses flooded with newsy documentaries, presenting the kind of big issue investigative reporting that used to find a home on ABC’s 20/20 or Dateline NBC. Oscar winner Alex Gibney’s been at the forefront of this cycle, with the theatrical releases Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, his examination of military Torture, Taxi to the Dark Side, and this year’s Casino Jack and […]