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 […]

CEDAR RAPIDS (2011, directed by Miguel Arteta, 86 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC If you can’t wait for The Hangover 2, Ed Helms has returned to the screen with a solo hangover, playing a child-like insurance agent partying for the first time in Cedar Rapids. Consistently amusing, if too familiar to feel truly inspired, Cedar Rapids pushes the outrageousness, yet never catches you by surprise.   Cedar Rapids is directed by the Miquel Arteta, who wrote his acclaimed debut, Star Maps, in 1997. Since then, Arteta has since made character-driven comedies with others scripts, most memorably Mike White, […]

KURT LODER: There’s London, there’s Paris, and there’s Cedar Rapids, Iowa—for straight-arrow Tim Lippe, not necessarily in that order. Tim (Ed Helms, of The Hangover) is a small-town insurance agent who looks upon his calling as heroic—he’s there when his clients need him most, and he really cares. He’s never been anywhere outside of peaceful Brown Valley, Wisconsin, where he still lives, in the same house he grew up in. True, he’s occasionally sleeping with his seventh-grade teacher (Sigourney Weaver), to whom he likes to think of himself as “pre-engaged,” but he’s otherwise a museum-quality naïf—never flown on a plane, […]

THE BLACK CAT (YABU NO NAKA NO KURANEKO) (1968, directed by Kaneto Shindô, 99 minutes, Japan) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Yesterday, the Inquirer reported yet another story of a soldier who had committed suicide after returning from the war. The idea of a soldier being haunted by the things he has seen in battle is an ancient one, and the story gets a mesmerizing telling in director Kaneto Shindô’s 1968 film The Black Cat. The classic ghost story has a free screening tonight at The Bellevue, as part of a weekly six-film series presented by Japanese culture impresario Eric […]

Tonight at International House, the Secret Cinema will be presenting an extremely rare dye-transfer Technicolor print of the1967 omnibus feature The Oldest Profession. Popularized during the foreign film boom of the 60s, an omnibus feature is a collection of shorts made by different directors exploring a single theme. The Oldest Profession is a blithe and often comedic examination of prostitution throughout the ages told in six parts. Despite the fact that it includes a segment from legendary French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard — which was made during what was arguably his richest period — and one from Philippe de […]

BLUE VALENTINE (2010, Dir. by Derek Cianfrance, 112 minutes, U.S.) If you’re expecting a warm-fuzzy remake of The Notebook, where romance-never-dies and love conquers all, think again. With Ryan Gosling assuming as the lead, along with Heath Ledger ex- Michelle Williams, it’s no wonder that such preconceptions arise, but, as the title suggests, this isn’t going to be all sunshine and lollipops. On the other hand, if you’ve come looking for a brutally realistic examination of love-on-the-rocks married life, accompanied by a reversal of typical gender stereotypes, then this is a film for you. From the get-go, the camera delves […]