BY MATTHEW DADDONA In 12 years, Bryan Singer hasn’t made a film nearly as electrifying or groundbreaking as The Usual Suspects, a testament not only to himself but also to the nature of fast, gripping crime stories. Singer, who recently directed the X-Men films and Superman Returns, is the mastermind behind this 1995 drama’s wit and suspense, and quite simply, the delicious irony of its title. The film opens with literal bang: A mysterious explosion on a ship, in which 27 men die over a reported $91 million in cocaine. From there we meet all the ‘usual suspects’ in […]

I’M NOT THERE (2007, directed by Todd Haynes, 135 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I’m Not There feel like a masters’ thesis on the themes that director Todd Haynes has been exploring for the last 20 years: the symbiotic relationship of image and identity, celebrity and anonymity; the porous borderlands of gender and sexuality and extending the outer limits of cinema’s artistic reach. With 1987’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story Haynes treated the bland exteriors of The Carpenters’ muzak-y cheese as a blank canvas and with 1998’s Velvet Goldmine he re-cast London in the Glam Rock 70s as […]

REDACTED (2007, directed by Brian De Palma, 90 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Coming off the highest profile flop of his career, a flat-footed adaptation of James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia, Brian De Palma is proving himself still spry at 68, with his camcorder-eye view of the Iraq War, Redacted. It’s an audacious move for De Palma, not just politically (the film has O’Reilly and his ilk frothing madly) but stylistically as well, robbing him of his trademark slow-motion set-pieces, florid musical scores and his gliding tracking shots. With Coppola soon to arrive with his bare-bones return to […]

Auditioning for the role of Han Solo. Priceless.

DALLAS MORNING NEWS: You might have read about it in the recent Parade magazine cover story penned by the actress. Except – shocking – she didn’t actually write it, even though the words “By Natalie Portman” adorn the cover. “They do an interview with you then sort of write it for you,” she says by phone. “They claim that you wrote it, but that’s not really how it works. They interview you like you’re interviewing me, then they just write it in the first person.” OK, so nobody was thinking about nominating Parade for a Pulitzer anyway. But it seems […]

SOUTHLAND TALES (2006, directed by Richard Kelly, 144 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Move over Michael Cimino. Grand in design, epic in its failure, Richard Kelly’s follow-up to the cult hit Donnie Darko is bound to be the new historical benchmark for young directors sending their careers up in flames. At nearly two and a half hours, the apocalyptic Southland Tales propels itself through its End Days scenario like an SUV rolling over on the freeway: it flips and flips and flips and flips till one wants to shout out in fear “Jesus, won’t this thing ever stop!” […]

Runnin’ Down A Dream (Dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 4-DISC DVD, 2007) BY AMY Z. QUINN As per usual, Philly was ahead of the curve on Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. If you grew up listening to the radio around here, you know that the first two albums, the self-titled debut and You’re Gonna Get It! were common cause on the local airwaves by 1979, back when FM was the Internet of its day. Thanks to the dashboard radio in my sister Terrie’s ’72 LeMans, I feel like I was born with the words to a half-dozen of their songs on my […]