THE WALL (2017, directed by Doug Liman, 81 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The battlefield on which the new thriller The Wall is set in is boringly familiar, a cliché even: the beige blankness of the desert, the armored U.S. soldiers, the bent and blasted rubble, and the forbidding drone-laden soundtrack with Arab voices chanting overtop. The history of Hollywood’s war films makes for a telling window into public attitudes about national conflicts about our endless wars in the Middle East (if you begin with the Afghanistan invasion of 2001), and the public’s unthinking acceptance of them, […]
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CINEMA: The Riddler
RISK (2017, directed by Laura Poitras, 97 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC As Risk, the latest film from documentarian Laura Poitras, gets underway — with its darkened hotel rooms, glowing LED screens and Poitras’ distinctive, hushed, monotone narration — it quickly feels like we’re back for a sequel to her Academy Award winning profile of whistle-blower Edward Snowden, 2014’s Citizenfour. Nobody is calling Risk a sequel, yet in some ways it is that and more, a film in production both before and after Citizenfour that contains and builds on all of the earlier films themes. As the film […]
CINEMA: Rust For Life
T2 Trainspotting (2017, directed by Danny Boyle, 117 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Trainspotting was a fun lark in 1996, so why not bring the boys back together 20 years later to catch up? Drawing partially from Irvine Welsh’s literary sequel, Porno, director Danny Boyle takes the dare and ties off for another hit of drugs, banter, and hi-jinks. Reuniting the 40-something Scots (Rent Boy, Sick Boy, Begbie, and Spud) the film wants to be a knowing look at middle-age but seems to be just as confused as its characters on the question of why is exists. Spud […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR: The late James Baldwin was one of the most influential African-American writers to emerge during the civil rights era. During the late 1950s and 1960s, he traveled through the South and addressed racial issues head on. In the course of his work, Baldwin got to know the civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. He was devastated when each man was assassinated, and planned, later in life, to write a book about all three of them. Though Baldwin died in 1987 before that book could be written, the new Oscar-nominated documentary, I […]
CINEMA: Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos
I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO (2016, directed by Raoul Peck, 95 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It looks like President Trump is going to follow the recent tradition and forgo a State of the Union speech as his first term begins, but with an eerie ambiance of resurrection, Raoul Peck has brought to life the fiery spirit of the late writer/intellectual James Baldwin to deliver the address. Hearing that Baldwin is at the center of the documentary, I Am Not Your Negro might lead you to expect your basic talking heads interviews about the man life and work. […]
CINEMA: Purple Reign
SIGN O’ THE TIMES (1987, directed by Prince, 89 minutes, U.S.) BREAKING GLASS (1980, directed by Brian Gibson, 103 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Andrew’s Video Vault presents a pair of semi-lost 80s rock films are on the bill Thursday night January 12th at the Rotunda in West Philly: Prince’s 1987 theatrical concert film Sign O’ the Times and Brian Gibson’s 1980 rise and fall of a British post-punk star Breaking Glass with Hazel O’Connor, in its extended U.K. Cut. It’s easy to see 1987’s double-album Sign O’ the Times as Prince’s cultural pinnacle, propelling three songs […]
THIS IS OUR MUSIC: Our Favorite Albums Of 2016
LEONARD COHEN You Want It Darker (Columbia) Everybody knows that 2016 was a cruel and unusual year. Intolerably cruel. Everybody knows that war is over and everybody knows the good guys lost. So I am only half-kidding when I ask: How can we possibly be expected to endure the abominable presidency of Donald Trump without David Bowie, Prince or Princess Leia? But I’m dead serious when I say we can’t do this without Leonard Cohen, who died at the ripe old age of 82 on the day before the election. As ever, his timing was impeccable. It goes without […]
CINEMA: Camelot In La La Land
LA LA LAND (2016, directed by Damien Chazelle, 128 minutes, U.S.) JACKIE (2016, directed by Pablo Larain, 99 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Trepidation preceded me sitting down for director Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to the award-winning hit Whiplash, a film that admittedly irked me in a most personal way. For those lucky enough to have missed it, Whiplash was a musical drama proposing that the best way to craft a new generation of jazz geniuses was to abuse them like a crazed drill sergeant in a house-of-horrors-come-classroom where never is heard an encouraging word. Driven by a […]
CINEMA: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
OLD STONE (Lao shi) (2016, directed by Johnny Ma, 80 minutes, Canada/China) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The advance word on the new thriller Old Stone, shot in the eastern Chinese city of Anhui by second generation Canadian director Johnny Ma, narrowcasts it as a damning indictment of contemporary Chinese society. In reality, this story of a man who turns desperate while battling the medical bureaucracy feels distressingly universal in its depiction of how governmental dehumanization rubs off on its citizenry. The film may be set in far-off China but U.S. audiences won’t have to squint too hard to […]
CINEMA: There’s No Place Like Home
BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK (2016, directed by Ang Lee, 110 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Ang Lee’s latest exemplifies the sort of intimate drama on a grand scale in which the director specializes. With Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, based on the best-selling novel by Ben Fountain, Lee again dazzles us with visceral, ambitious visuals, but the story at its heart seems just as simplistic as the empty patriotism against which the film rails. It is brilliantly constructed, a time capsule set in the early years of our 21st century war on Iraq, with the scene at […]
CINEMA: Black Lives Shatter
Moonlight (2016, directed by Barry Jenkins, 110 minutes, U.S.) The Handmaiden (2016, directed by Park Chan-wook, 144 minutes, South Korea) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC A couple years ago, I climbed aboard the critical pile-on for Richard Linklater’s ten-years-in-the-making epic, Boyhood, an intimate coming of age story that grew up alongside its young star. Watching a kid grew over a decade in a fictional film was an intriguing novelty and Linklater has a genial way with actors but through all the film’s pleasures was a gnawing thought that this kid’s life and experiences at their heart were not very […]
CINEMA: Bye Bye Miss American Pie
AMERICAN HONEY (2016, directed by Andrea Arnold, 163 minutes, U.K./U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Writer/director Andrea (Fish Tank) Arnold’s perspective is apparent from the first frame of her immersive youth epic American Honey. Being a British director shooting in the U.S. for the first time, you might imagine that Arnold’s instinct would be to use the widescreen frame to capture those endless horizons of the American Midwest. But no, Arnold uses an unusually boxy 1.37:1 aspect ratio to tell her story, a story of young characters enjoying a rambling freedom but not necessarily endless possibilities. The film laces us […]
CINEMA: ReBirth Of A Nation
BIRTH OF A NATION (2016, directed by Nate Parker, 120 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I’m surprised how often I’ve heard critics and commentators sigh about, “another Hollywood film about slavery.” Has Hollywood really exhausted the subject? The 1975’s potboiler Mandingo, Spielberg’s overly-stately Amistad, Jonathan Demme’s mishandled adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Tarantino’s leering Django Unchained and Steve McQueen’s 2013 Academy Award-winner 12 Years a Slave; I’d say that is five major efforts over the last forty years. Like the Jewish Holocaust, the era is ripe with raw emotions and dramatic possibilities, but like the American genocide of […]