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 […]
TELEVISION: Mind Games
Have you ever opened Facebook and swore that it was eavesdropping on your conversation? Either you see an ad for something you were just talking about or, even creepier, just thinking about? Well that is just one example of targeted advertisements, which illustrates just how accurate data mining has become today. Online retailers can now predict a consumer’s purchasing plans based on google searches and web traffic. It’s what William Gibson dubbed pattern recognition. One of the breakout docs at Sundance this year, The Great Hack just hit Netflix and in our interconnected world it could be one of the […]
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.
CINEMA: Always Is Always Forever
SPOILER ALERT: Do not read this until after you see the film if you are one of those people who likes to go in with a blank slate. The following is the full monty. BY DAN TABOR AND JONATHAN VALANIA Once Upon A Time In Hollywood , Quentin Tarantino’s Manson-adjacent Hollywood hippie fantasia, is a fuckin’ hoot — let’s just make that clear up front. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton, who is kind of an amalgam of Tab Hunter, Fabian, Ty Harden and James Garner. You know, basically your typical ‘50s handsome leading he-man with a big […]
CINEMA: Paint It Black
EDITOR’S NOTE: To mark the eighth anniversary of Amy Winehouse’s criminally premature passing on July 23rd, 2011, we’re reposting our review of Asif Kapadia’s heartbreaking 2015 documentary, Amy. AMY (2015, directed by Asif Kapadia, 128 minutes, USA) BY JONATHAN VALANIA The fallen jazz singer Amy Winehouse was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. The new documentary Amy, which maps with the clarity of hindsight Winehouse’s fairly meteoric rise and precipitous demise, is not far behind. Directed by Asif Kapadia (Senna), Amy arrives barely four years after her ridiculously premature death at the age of 27 from a combination of […]
CINEMA: Swedish Death Mettle
MIDSOMMAR (Dir. by Ari Aster, 140 minutes, 2019, USA) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC It’s been a little over a year since Hereditary was unleashed on audiences and horror wunderkind Ari Aster is already back with Midsommar, yet another transgressive opus. A24 had originally planned to make Midsommar as a slasher film set in Sweden when they offered Aster the project, instead of taking it as is, he rewrote the script from the ground up, turning in a sophomore effort that solidifies him as one of this generation’s most interesting voices in horror. The film still shares some DNA with […]