KNIVES OUT (directed by Rian Johnson, 130 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR The whodunnit murder mystery is a genre that’s kind of faded into obscurity over the years. It’s probably because audiences are a lot savvier when it comes this genre’s patented plot twist denouement reveal, making this one of the more difficult genres to pull off effectively in the age of social media. Be that as it may, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is a brilliant love letter to the drawing room sleuthing of the likes of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, and easily one of the best films […]
CINEMA: The Kid And The Wail
MARRIAGE STORY (directed by Noah Baumbach, 136 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Marriage Story, written and directed by Noah Baumbach, begins at the tail end of Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole’s (Scarlett Johansson) union with the pair unsuccessfully attempting divorce mediation. Nicole who once had a successful film career in LA, moved to New York where she fell in love with Charlie. Soon married, the pair worked together in the New York theater scene with Charlie writing/directing and Nicole as his wife, muse and lead, not to mention the mother of their son. A profile in Brooklyn […]
CINEMA: Q&A W/ Knives Out Director Rian Johnson
BY DAN TABOR Easily one of the most surreal moments I had this year was getting to chat with director Rian Johnson (The Last Jedi, Looper, Breaking Bad) the morning after seeing his latest film, Knives Out, at the Philadelphia Film Festival. Knives Out is a hilariously brilliant whodunit in the spirit of Agatha Christie, that has Johnson tackling the story of an eccentric family under investigation, after the “suicide” of their extremely wealthy, murder mystery-writing patriarch. Johnson immediately made an impression with both filmgoers and critics with his first feature Brick and has since directed both films (Looper) […]
CINEMA: Punk Rock Horror Picture Show
Punk rock legend, Glenn Danzig, who is currently in the midst of his reunion tour with The Misfits is making a solo stop at our very own Philadelphia Film Center, Friday, December the 13th, the night before The Misfits play the Wells Fargo Center. Danzig will be presenting an exclusive, one-night-only screening of his directorial debut, Verotika, a feature-length horror anthology of tales culled from his comic book series. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Danzig and producer James Cullen Bressack. Verotika premiered at this year’s Cinepocalypse Film Fest and reportedly achieved instant infamy, drawing comparisons […]
CINEMA: Bad Fellas
THE IRISHMAN (directed by Martin Scorsese, 209 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Based on the mob hitman memoir I Hear You Paint Houses, The Irishman is the “true” story of Irish Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a blue-collar World War II veteran who made a life for himself in the Italian mafia hitman “painting houses” with the blood of his wiseguy victims. At the start of The Irishman, we meet Frank living out his final days in a nursing home as he reflects back on how he rose to the right-hand of not only Russell Bufalino […]
CINEMA: Springtime For Hitler
JOJO RABBIT (directed by Taika Waititi, 108 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR Jojo Rabbit is the answer to the unasked question: what if Wes Anderson decided to make a whimsical, black comedic satire about Nazis? Based on Christine Leunens’s book Caging Skies and set at the tail end of World War II, Jojo Rabbit is the story of 10 year-old Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis), who lives in Germany with his single mother (Scarlett Johansson) and his imaginary best friend, a cartoonish version of Adolph Hitler played by the film’s director Taika Waititi (Thor Ragnarok, Hunt for the Wilderpeople). […]
CINEMA: Moby Dicks
THE LIGHTHOUSE (directed by Robert Eggers, 109 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Robert Eggers The Witch was nothing short of a masterpiece, a complex cinematic meditation on feminism and coming of age using witchcraft as a metaphorical framework that is unveiled in a slow burn narrative. So I’ve been eagerly anticipating Robert Eggers’ follow-up and when it was finally unveiled that it would be starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, I was all-in. While some will never forgive Pattinson for his wooden acting in the Twilight movies, let the record show he’s used the celebrity that […]
CINEMA: Zombies All The Way Down
ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP (dir. by Ruben Fleisher, 99 minutes, 2019, USA) BY DAN TABOR It’s been over a decade since the release of Zombieland, the charmingly dysfunctional family comedy that just so happens to take place during the zombie apocalypse. The Ruben Fleischer directed film was the front runner of our current zombie resurgence, soon followed by the juggernaut that is The Walking Dead, which over nine years has run its course both as a show and as a fixture in the pop-culture landscape. Thanks to TWD I think every variation of the formula has been attempted in every […]
Q&A: Tigers Are Not Afraid Director Issa Lopez
Photo by Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC Tigers Are Not Afraid, which hits Philadelphia theaters next week, is a stunningly phantasmagorical Mexican horror/fantasy flick about a group of children who create a morose fairytale world to help cope with/explain the murder of their parents at the hands of the bloodthirsty drug cartels. This premise of abandoned Mexican children struggling to find hope in a world without is shockingly more relevant today than it was when I originally got to see it on the festival circuit back in 2017. The highest compliment I can […]
CINEMA: Kill Yr. Idols
THE FANATIC (Dir. by Fred Durst, 88 minutes, USA, 2019) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC No one is more familiar with the fickle and bizarre nature of fame and fandom than Limp Bizkit’s backwards-baseball-cap-wearing bro-dawg front man Fred Durst who had the world turn on him almost as fast as it embraced him. Since his precipitous descent from rap-rock stardom Durst has since ingrained himself in Hollywood, trying his hand at acting and even hosting a weekly jazz night at a Magic Club that was inspired by La La Land. So, when I heard he was directing a film […]
REVIEW: Hamilton @ The Forrest Theatre
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip hop musical about the life of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton has tapped into the politico/sociocultural zeitgeist, generating the kind of rabid fandom usually reserved for things like Marvel and Star Wars, and commanding thousands on the grey market for a seat at one of its sold out shows. The touring production opened Wednesday at Philadelphia’s Forrest Theatre where it will play through November 11, bringing Hamilton’s story to the city where the titular protagonist spent 15 years of his life while a member of the Congress of the Confederation and the Constitutional Convention. In fact the location […]
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 […]