Deep down we all knew it would take a fellow Method Actor madman to tattoo over the indelible scar Heath Ledger’s Joker left on the culture. WARNER BROS: Director Todd Phillips’ “Joker” centers around the iconic arch nemesis and is an original, standalone fictional story not seen before on the big screen. Phillips’ exploration of Arthur Fleck, who is indelibly portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, is of a man struggling to find his way in Gotham’s fractured society. A clown-for-hire by day, he aspires to be a stand-up comic at night…but finds the joke always seems to be on him. Caught […]
INCOMING: El Camino, Bitch
The Netflix Television Event EL CAMINO: A BREAKING BAD MOVIE reunites fans with Jesse Pinkman (Emmy-winner Aaron Paul). In the wake of his dramatic escape from captivity, Jesse must come to terms with his past in order to forge some kind of future. This gripping thriller is written and directed by Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad. The movie is produced by Mark Johnson, Melissa Bernstein, Charles Newirth, Diane Mercer and Aaron Paul, in association with Sony Pictures Television. RELATED: “Bitch!” Montage
INCOMING: Ziggy Played Guitar
PITCHFORK: The first picture of Johnny Flynn in Stardust is here. Check out the shot, taken by Paul Van Carter, above. The forthcoming, unauthorized film—which producers insist is “not a biopic”—depicts David Bowie’s life and transformation into Ziggy Stardust in the early 1970s, as he embarks on a road trip to America. MORE PREVIOUSLY: Stardust, an upcoming film about David Bowie, has cast its leading man, as Deadline and Screen International note. The role will be played by actor-musician Johnny Flynn, and he will be accompanied by Marc Maron—portraying Bowie’s publicist—and Jena Malone (The Hunger Games) as Bowie’s first wife, […]
CINEMA: Re-Born In The USA
BLINDED BY THE LIGHT (Directed by Gurinder Chadha, 118 min., 2019, USA) BY JASMIN ALVAREZ Recently, director Gurinder Chadha led a Q&A in Philly to discuss her new movie Blinded By The Light (2019) and the harrowing actuality of immigrant life during the Thatcherite ‘80s that impelled her to reimagine an upbeat and unifying cinematic alternative history. The screenplay is adapted from the memoir Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion, and Rock N’ Roll, written by journalist Sarfraz Manzoor, a second-generation British-Pakistani turned Springsteen-zealot who found shelter from the racist cruelties of Thatcher-fueled xenophobia in the music of The Boss. […]
Tonite They Ride The Eternal Highways Of Valhalla
Artwork by THOMAS POLLART via Easy Rider VARIETY: The first significant step Fonda took in the path toward the success he would achieve through “Easy Rider” was a starring role, with Nancy Sinatra and Bruce Dern, in Roger Corman’s 1966 Hells Angels drama “The Wild Angels.” It was the first of a series of successful biker pictures produced by American International Pictures that screened at drive-ins across the country. The next step was the 1967 feature “The Trip,” directed by Corman and written by Jack Nicholson. This piece of what has been termed psychedelic cinema follows a young director of […]
CINEMA: Blackbird Singing In The Dead Of Night
THE NIGHTINGALE (Directed by Jennifer Kent, 136 minutes, AUS, 2019) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC After wowing Sundance in 2014 with The Babadook, Australian director Jennifer Kent had Hollywood knocking down her door. But instead of going more mainstream, Kent opted for a much darker, more personal take on a bit of Australian history largely unknown to most non-Aussie audiences. The Nightingale is a western set in 1825 that is bitingly relevant to present day America in the wake of the #metoo movement. Set in Tasmania during the brutal British colonization of The Land Down Under known as the […]
Q&A: Aisling Franciosi From Game Of Thrones
BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC The Nightingale, director Jennifer Kent’s follow-up to her 2014 breakout hit Babadook, tells an intimate story about the history of her home country Australia. The gritty western takes place in 1825 during the ‘Black War’ with the British attempting to colonize the Island of Tasmania and drive out its Aboriginal inhabitants any way they can. The film stars Aisling Franciosi as Clare, a young Irish convict shipped to Tasmania to serve her seven-year debt to the British government, which when the film begins, she has just completed. The problem is the abusive British lieutenant […]
CINEMA: Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life
This looks pretty great, due out December 13th.
CINEMA: Dog’s Life
THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN (Dir. by Simon Curtis, 109 min., USA, 2019) BY JASMIN ALVAREZ Garth Stein’s philosophical, tear-jerk 2008 novel starts at its end. The senile narrator, a dog named Enzo (named after Ferrari founder, Enzo Ferrari), reexamines his own life as he lies in a puddle of his own urine and awaits the arrival of his owner and his own inevitable euthanization. He proceeds by playing back, in a series of heartfelt vignettes, both the most crucial and endearingly mundane moments of his life, which was spent with a family that considered him as […]
CINEMA: The Beloved
THE PIECES I AM (Dir. Timothy Greenfield Sanders, 119 min., USA, 2019) BY JASMIN ALVAREZ Few authors have succeeded in capturing, with incomparable eloquence, the most poignant and heart-rending episodes of black history the way that acclaimed author Toni Morrison has in her haunting and deeply humane novels, for which she has been awarded both a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize. “If there’s life on Mars, they’re reading Toni Morrison to learn what it means to be human,” muses Columbia University professor Farah Griffin in The Pieces I Am, an intimate and deeply-affecting tribute documentary honoring Morrison’s life and literary […]
CINEMA: Q&A W/ Director M. Night Shyamalan
BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Philly loves an underdog. Rocky, Gritty, The Phillies, The Eagles et al. Add to the list our own M. Night Shyamalan. Like all good underdog stories, after a promising start he hit a bit of a rough patch (The Happening, Avatar the Last Airbender) but eventually reconnected with audiences by returning to his low budget genre roots with his stealth sequel to Unbreakable, Split. The Sixth Sense, the film that originally introduced us to the world of auteur M. Night, turns 20 years old this week, and in the course of the last two […]
CINEMA: Born To Run
From trailblazing, Emmy-winning writer Lena Waithe (Netflix’s Master of None) and Melina Matsoukas, the visionary director of some of this generation’s most powerful pop-culture experiences, including Beyonce’s “Formation” and the Nike “Equality” campaign, comes Makeready’s unflinching new drama, Queen & Slim. While on a forgettable first date together in Ohio, a black man (Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya) and a black woman (Jodie Turner-Smith, in her first starring feature-film role), are pulled over for a minor traffic infraction. The situation escalates, with sudden and tragic results, when the man kills the police officer in self-defense. Terrified and in fear for […]
TRAILER: The Lighthouse
If Eraserhead was an old timey sea chantey. Coming October 18th from Robert Eggers, the director of The Witch. Starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattison.