SULLY (2016, 98 minutes, directed by Clint Eastwood, 96 minutes) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The lean, squinty, man-of-few-words Clint Eastwood has had an affinity for pilots going back to one of his earliest roles, dropping the bomb on top of the giant spider in the 50s sci-fi classic, Tarantula. Those stoic figures, who hold the lives of others in the palms of their hands, fits right into mold of many of the characters Eastwood himself has played: stoic, solitary men who we can count on in dangerous times to get the job done. With the true story of […]
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CINEMA: Cum On Feel The Boyz
SLADE IN FLAME (1975, directed by Richard Loncraine, 86 minutes U.K.) OIL CITY CONFIDENTIAL (2009, directed by Julien Temple, 106 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC British rock gave us plenty of adorable mop tops and fey dandies but they also have a long tradition of rough and tumble r&b, rock and blues bands whose fan base ran strong beyond the sophisticated borders of London and into the wilds of the country’s midlands. This month’s double bill joins two rather different films about two different bands, navigating the wild waters of the 70s music industry. Slade in Flame […]
CINEMA: Downton Gabby
LOVE & FRIENDSHIP (2016, directed by Whit Stillman, 92 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Whit Stillman’s world of arch comic verbosity has always had the stiff air of ingrained upper crust manners, so the idea of Stillman doing a period Jane Austin adaptation seemed perhaps a bit too spot-on. Instead, it’s a match made in heaven. Far livelier then your typical velvety old British romance, Love and Friendship finds Stillman snapping into great mid-career form as he propels Kate Beckinsale gliding through stately manors and defying the patriarchy by steadily willing her own destiny. Set adrift since […]
CINEMA: Being Hal Ashby
LOOKIN’ TO GET OUT (1982, directed by Hal Ashby, 120 minutes U.S.) SECOND HAND HEART (aka THE HAMSTER OF LOVE) (1981, directed by Hal Ashby, 102 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind’s popular tome about American film in the 1970s, Hal Ashby is held up as the quintessential director of his era. Ashby specialized in humanistic tales of outcasts looking for love and struggling to find their place in the world and the seven films he made between 1970 and 1979 make for an unusually rich and diverse body of work, […]
LISTEN LIKE THIEVES: The Jazz Messenger
Phawker film critic Dan Buskirk moonlights as an esteemed jazz authority on WPRB. Not just jazz with good taste, but jazz that also tastes good! See for yourself.
CINEMA: A Knight In The Ruts
KNIGHT OF CUPS (2016, directed by Terrence Malick, 118 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It took a lot of mental thrashing to come to this conclusion but weeks after screening Terrence Malick’s latest magnum opus Knight of Cups, I feel comfortable saying that it is a major Terrence Malick film. What else is there to compare it to? Who else in Hollywood can drum up such a plush budget and major box-office stars to make a plotless, nearly dialogue-free rumination on the big meanings of life? And who else could make it something you’d want to watch? […]
CINEMA: Shagadelic, Baby!
THE TOUCHABLES (1968, directed by Robert Freeman, 89 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC As part of The Philadelphia Art Museum’s “Pop Goes the Museum” exhibition The Secret Cinema will be presenting a rare screening of Robert Freeman’s 1968 Pop-tastic film, The Touchables in 16mm. Set in and around “Swingin’ London” The Touchables was dismissed by Renata Adler at the New York Times as “a sort of fidgety mod pornography, ” perhaps understandable in its time. Yet to modern eyes the film looks like a 60s fetishist’s catalog of groovy fashions, beautiful people, and Playboy Magazine-derived titillation, off-set […]
CINEMA: Fight The Power!
Just as it was shocking that it took till 2014 to get a major fictionalized film of Martin Luther King Jr. it is surprisingly that the explosive story of The Black Panther Party would not have a major documentary until now. Stanley Nelson Jr.’s documentary Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution assembles all the important people and footage to tell this story of a revolution’s rise and its government-engineered fall with power and insight. It may have arrived late but in light of the Black Lives Matter movement the film has appeared right on time. — DAN BUSKIRK
CINEMA: American Unexceptionalism
WHERE TO INVADE NEXT (2015, directed by Michael Moore, 119 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Screened for critics back in December, Michael Moore’s latest documentary Who To Invade Next, has dramatically changed context in recent weeks. In December, Moore’s first film in six years seemed like another potent film essay critical of American politics. Today, the film plays like an impassioned plea for the Presidential candidate who has made the issues discussed within a centerpiece of his campaign, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Despite the title, the film’s subject is not our military policy, it is is our […]
BEST OF: Our Favorite Albums Of 2015
In the immortal words of the Chairman Of The Board, it was a very good year. So was last year, and the one before that and the one before that and so on. Why? Mostly, we can thank the disruptive, game-eating power of the Internet. The best thing that ever happened to music was the web-abetted collapse of the music industry’s one-size-fit-most paradigm and the death of radio as the prime determinant of what people like. Now people find music everywhere, it literally rains out of everything with an electric pulse, which has triggered a radical re-calibration of the vectors […]
CINEMA: Who’s That Girl?
THE DANISH GIRL (2015, directed by Tom Hooper, 119 minutes, U.K.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Just to make sure people didn’t think it was a film about a girl who loved pastries, the studio has been leaking pictures of Eddie Redmayne in all his cross-dressing elegance as the title character in The Danish Girl, another lush period piece from Tom Hooper, director of 2010’s Oscar-winning The King’s Speech, for months prior to the film’s release. In this post-Caitlin Jenner moment, The Danish Girl hopes to ride its subject into the money this holiday season. Too bad its story […]
CINEMA: The Fault Is In Our Stars
THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES (2015, directed by Billy Ray, 111 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The Secret in Their Eyes, a new thriller opening today, comes to the screen with an impressive pedigree. A remake of the Academy Award-winning Argentinian film of the same name, it is helmed by director Billy Ray, coming off the Oscar-nominated Captain Phillips and co-starring two Oscar-winning actresses, Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts. It is the type of noir-ish mystery that is a formulaic house of cards one would hope Hollywood could mount with some sort of efficiency. With Roberts and […]
CINEMA: In The Name Of The Father
SPOTLIGHT (2015, directed by Tom McCarthy, 128 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Since 2003, writer/director Tom McCarthy has directed a steady handful of compact little character-driven indie features (The Station Agent, The Visitor, Win/Win) that have been among the most resonant U.S. films of our era. With Spotlight, his sprawling look at the Boston Globe‘s investigation of the Catholic clergy’s sex crimes, McCarthy gives the impression of a talent in full bloom. In his largest scale film yet, Spotlight takes us down the wormhole of abuse, lies and church power without losing us in the labyrinth or forgetting […]