Picks For The Final Festival Weekend
Sorting through a film festival schedule can feel a bit like solving a Rubik s Cube and a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle at the same time. At any given moment during Cinefest, which continues through Monday, there are three to six films screening at the s...
 2.7K - Apr. 3, 2009; scored 1000.0 Adventureland: Nostalgic Themepark Hijinks
Surely there s something to admire in a film that cracks wise about Plato and Gogol and a moment later sees one character assault another in the genitals. Almost all brows of humor can be found in Adventureland, director Greg Mottola s nostalgic f...
4.0K - Apr. 3, 2009; scored 1000.0 Odd Capers, Gentlemen Thieves
In so many ways, it s evident that for director Rian Johnson, The Brothers Bloom is a labor of love. It screened Tuesday night at the Prince Music Theater, and stars Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo as two brothers-cum-con men who choreograph complica...
2.9K - Apr. 2, 2009; scored 1000.0 Up ... And Away!
When did our serious movies stop being fun? Or to pivot closer to the point: Why have our entertainments particularly those for children become so inconsequential? (I m looking at you, Hotel For Dogs. ) It seems the family-friendly landscape has...
6.2K - Jun. 2, 2009; scored 1000.0 Feeling The Philadelphia Draw
Although she s been a Left Coaster since attending college at the University of California, Berkeley, Lauren Karl keeps feeling the Philadelphia pull. The actress grew up on the Main Line, and two of her upcoming films Our Lady Of Victory and Bo...
3.3K - Apr. 1, 2009; scored 1000.0 Churchill: Preserving Britain As A New One Emerged
Into The Storm, a new movie about Winston Churchill that will air Sunday night at 9 p.m. on HBO, mostly follows the iconic British prime minister during the years of World War II, but it frames its action from the months immediately after, as Church...
3.5K - May. 29, 2009; scored 1000.0 Up ... And Away!
When did our serious movies stop being fun? Or to pivot closer to the point: Why have our entertainments particularly those for children become so inconsequential? (I m looking at you, Hotel For Dogs. ) It seems the family-friendly landscape has...
6.2K - May. 29, 2009; scored 1000.0 Journal To Print Wyeth s Goodbye
CORRECTION APPENDED A Maine ecological journal this weekend will reproduce Goodbye, the final painting by the artist Andrew Wyeth. The late Chadds Ford artist who was one of the most notable, and at times controversial, painters of the 20th centu...
2.5K - May. 26, 2009; scored 1000.0 For Edies, With Love And Squalor
How do we account for this, the long, strange cultural half-life of Grey Gardens? Both a foreshadowing of today s fascination with celebrity and a compelling human drama, the 1976 film by the Maysles brothers has managed to endure far beyond the she...
7.0K - May. 22, 2009; scored 1000.0 Journal To Print Wyeth s Goodbye
A Maine ecological journal this weekend will reproduce Goodbye, the final painting by the artist Andrew Wyeth. The late Chadds Ford artist who was one of the most notable, and at times controversial, painters of the 20th century created the pai...
2.3K - May. 21, 2009; scored 1000.0 Orchestra Announces Neighborhood Concerts
The Philadelphia Orchestra s free summer concert series will include performances at Philadelphia University and Deliverance Evangelistic Church, the organization announced yesterday. The June 27 concert at Philadelphia University marks both the begi...
2.4K - May. 20, 2009; scored 1000.0 Lone Wolf, Imaginary World
If a theme runs through the films of Jim Jarmusch, it is that of the lone male adventurer the man on the fringes, the laconic hipster, the prisoner, the modern-day cowboy. So it should tell you something that the searching, stoic assassin at the ce...
4.4K - May. 15, 2009; scored 1000.0 Traditions Personified On Stage
Each episode of On Canvas, WHYY TV s music and dance program, focuses on a single artist or group, and yet in the interviews that pepper each show s performances, the subjects seem particularly interested in discussing the careers and lives of othe...
4.9K - May. 12, 2009; scored 1000.0 A Minimalist Long In Voice And Vision
When it comes to filmmakers of the American art house, we are used to audacity as the instrument of provocation. Humility, not so much. I think it s very important for the director not to be the star of the film, Ramin Bahrani said on an afternoon e...
9.4K - May. 8, 2009; scored 1000.0 Two Sides Of The Dream
Goodbye Solo opens with a transaction: A 70ish Southern man, William, offers to pay a cab driver $1,000 to drive him to the top of a mountain in 10 days time, and leave him there. This is kind of strange, you ve got to give me that, says the buoy...
2.7K - May. 8, 2009; scored 1000.0 That '70s Mope
Why are the suburbs so suffocating, and why were the 70s so sad? That s what I wish I d asked Steven Martini at a question-and-answer session following a screening of Lymelife last month during Philadelphia Cinefest. Mr. Martini co-wrote the film ...
5.1K - May. 1, 2009; scored 1000.0 Magician's Final Trick
Around the time The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button came out late last year, I posited that even without the magical-realism conceit, any story about a boy growing up among the elderly would have to result in a character so similarly and profoundly...
4.0K - May. 1, 2009; scored 1000.0 On Eastwood, Director And Icon
Over the course of his half-century career, and particularly starring as the violent, politically incorrect cop Dirty Harry Callahan, Clint Eastwood has delivered some of the American cinema s most memorable catch-phrases. To wit, it s hard to im...
4.2K - Apr. 29, 2009; scored 1000.0 By-The-Books Brawls In Eccentric NYC
Inevitably, the only realistic litmus test for a movie called Fighting has to be, well, the fighting. This gritty New York piece directed by Dito Montiel ( A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints ) has four underground street fights (and some stock plot...
3.0K - Apr. 24, 2009; scored 1000.0 A 1980s Morality Tale, Sans Morality
You should probably know that the Bret Easton Ellis collection from which Gregor Jordan has derived The Informers, his latest assault on subtlety and good taste, involves a short story about a vampire. Apparently, the Australian director ( Buffalo ...
5.0K - Apr. 24, 2009; scored 1000.0 | 
