CINEDELPHIA: Cinedelphia.com is a new online resource for repertory film screenings in the Philadelphia area. These types of screenings are often ignored by major showtime websites as well as the online counterparts of our city’s major publications. Adventurous movie-goers no longer need to visit multiple venue sites for listings as Cinedelphia provides a comprehensive overview with links directly to said sites’ event details. MORE

DAVID EDELSTEIN: The Green Hornet at least is likable, a refreshing change from all those heavy, angst-ridden superhero movies. The director is Michel Gondry of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a virtuoso at making childish fantasies take wing. And I’m not the first to notice a Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road-movie vibe between the two stars, Seth Rogen (as Britt Reid, aka The Green Hornet) and Jay Chou (the kung fu master Kato), who are both smitten with Cameron Diaz in the Dorothy Lamour role. Rogen’s Britt is a ne’er-do-well rich kid, the son of a disapproving media mogul played […]

DAVID EDELSTEIN: Gone are the days when filmmakers kept a respectful distance from their characters. In Blue Valentine, writer and director Derek Cianfrance is obsessive in how he uses the hand-held camera to get in his actors’ faces. Yet there’s something in those faces to see — something momentous, angry, desperate, unmanageable. The film is a rough ride with the shock absorbers removed. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams play a married couple, Dean and Cindy, with a little daughter named Frankie. Dean paints houses and Cindy is a nurse. The movie’s opening is as ominous as any horror film. The […]

BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC 2010! What a confounding year politically-speaking, and a similarly confused, bleak and exciting year for film as well. I can never quite get into movie critic character, striding down from the mountaintop and proclaim “The Twelve Greatest Films of the Year!” But here’s a dozen films I’d like to remember from 2010, realizing that the market ubiquity of successes like David Fincher’s The Social Network and Aronofsky’s Black Swan (both of which I really liked) will make those films unavoidable for the next decade. What could be more universal than a depiction of life after […]

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 […]