Search Results for: dan buskirk

GRINDHOUSE (2007, directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, 191 min., U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC What has happened to Quentin Tarantino? There was a time when the Animals were considered as good as the Stones, a time when Stallone was touted as the next Brando and a time when Tarantino was thought of as one of the next important American filmmakers. Grindhouse, a double feature pairing “Death Planet,” from Sin City‘s Robert Rodriguez, with “Death Proof,” a new feature from the only video store clerk to win Golden Palm at Cannes. With it, Tarantino extends his vacation from […]

(2007, directed by Karen Moncrieff, 85 min., U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC This past week I happened to see Rosanna Arquette’s 2002 film Searching For Debra Winger, a star-filled documentary in which a wide array of film actresses talk about the joys and heartaches of being a woman in the business. Marcia Gay Harden is among the actresses rightfully bemoaning the dearth of juicy roles for women, and a film like Karen Moncrieff‘s The Dead Girl, an anthology film with roles for eight actresses (includingt Harden), is just the sort of worthy project these women were imagining.Following five troubled […]

(1962, directed by Alberto Lattuada, 105 min., Italy) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC There was quite a lot of grumbling last year over the fact that many critics listed Jean-Pierre Melville‘s 1969 war film Army of Shadows as the best film of 2006, as it was getting its first U.S. screenings 37 years after it was made. Resurrected by the small distributor Rialto Pictures and it honestly was like nothing else seen in theaters last year. This year, Rialto is setting its hopes on another forgotten gem, Alberto Lattuada’s 1962 tragic-comedy Mafioso. While it’s not as stylistically daring as the […]

WHAT, WHERE, WHEN: Captain Milkshake, rarely-screened 1969 Hippie Anti-War Film, Andrew’s Video Vault at the Rotunda, 8 PM TONIGHT! BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I lived in the San Francisco Bay area for most of the ’90s, and with their numerous repertory movie houses, one could hang out at the movies every night. The Pacific Film Archive, The Castro, The Roxy, The Red Vic, the UC Theater, The Fine Arts — I slouched for hours in their seats, catching scores of double features of noir films, foreign oddities, indie documentaries and weirdo one-offs that I’ll probably never be able to […]

(2006, Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 137 minutes, Germany) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC When the subject arises of the U.S. Patriot Act, which allows government increased powers of surveillance, there’s always someone who argues, “Why should anyone care, unless they’re hiding something?” For those without the imagination to conceive of how a Surveillance Society invites abuse, German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has crafted a very patient and engrossing thriller that slowly turns the screws of tension on a character under complete scrutiny. It’s successful enough to make anyone’s inner paranoiac wiggle in his seat. The title crawl […]

(2007, Directed by Craig Brewer, 115 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I can’t remember the last time a movie poster stopped me dead in my tracks. Laid out to look like the cover of a Marvel comic book, here’s Samuel L. Jackson looking like a Southern sharecropper, holding a chain that has Christina Ricci dressed up like Daisy Duke attached at the end. What is this, a cross-racial Last Tango, a sexually sadistic Saw? Is the chain merely metaphorical? Nope, nope and nope. The poster is unambiguous truth in advertising: Black Snake Moan actually is about impoverished, guitar-playing […]

(2006, directed by Andrew Bujalski, 110 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Andrew Bujalski’s 2002 debut Funny Ha-Ha was such a dead-on portrait of confused urban twenty-somethings that I was curious to catch his well-reviewed follow-up, Mutual Appreciation in the theater. Would a young audience find this devastatingly unvarnished study of dumb-struck hipsters funny, or would the humbling awkwardness of the main characters hit too close to laugh along with? Alas, I still don’t know; when I caught the film during its brief run at the Ritz in Center City, there were only three other attendees, all of them […]