Archive

THE BIJOU @ TIFF: Francis Ford Coppola’s “Twixt”

Posted September 12, 2011 by Mitch Salem

> It’s anyone’s guess why Francis Ford Coppola, at the age of 72, with some enduring cinema classics to his name, would decide to make a movie that’s a cross between a David Lynch retread, an old horror cheapie, and a hallucination.  What matters is that the resulting TWIXT is utterly dreadful, the worst film […]

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Film Festival

SHOWBUZZDAILY @ SUNDANCE 2013: “The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman”

Posted January 31, 2013 by Mitch Salem

It’s a cliche to say, when a director of commercials and music videos helms his or her first feature film, that the result resembles a video extended to feature length–and certainly not one that’s always true, as the debuts of, among others, Ridley Scott (The Duellists) and David Fincher (Alien 3) have shown.  But cliches […]

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Film Festival

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “Peterloo” & “Viper Club”

Posted September 14, 2018 by Mitch Salem

  PETERLOO (Amazon – November 9):  Not so much a movie as an illustrated historical recitation.  Mike Leigh’s film concerns the brutal 1819 government militia attack on civilians listening to a public address at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, England, which came to be known as “Peterloo” because the bloodshed was likened to the then-recent […]

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Articles

THE BIJOU @ TIFF: Whit Stillman’s “Damsels In Distress”

Posted September 16, 2011 by Mitch Salem

> Whit Stillman has one of the most distinctive voices in American film, and his 13-year absence from the screen barely shows in his new comedy DAMSELS IN DISTRESS; it feels as though, had it been made immediately after The Last Days of Disco in 1998, nothing about it would be the slightest bit different. […]

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Current Release

SHOWBUZZDAILY Streaming Film Review: “Palm Springs”

Posted July 12, 2020 by Mitch Salem

  The borders between “movies” and “television” were already beginning to buckle pre-pandemic, thanks to Netflix and the desire of studios to release their product on as many simultaneous platforms as possible.  Now, of course, we’ve been 4 months without movie theaters, and the most optimistic view is that wide openings are still weeks if […]

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Film Festival

SHOWBUZZDAILY Sundance 2015 Review: “The Bronze”

Posted January 28, 2015 by Mitch Salem

  THE BRONZE is an entertaining but standard-issue R-rated American comedy, equal parts Bad Teacher and any Danny McBride vehicle, which makes one wonder what it’s doing in the Dramatic Competition line-up at the Sundance Film Festival.  (McBride’s breakout movie The Foot Fist Way also premiered at Sundance, but in the more genre-oriented Midnight section.)  Another similarity to […]

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Film Festival

ShowbuzzDaily Sundance 2022 Review: “My Old School”

Posted January 24, 2022 by Mitch Salem

  MY OLD SCHOOL (no distrib):  Although the story is apparently well-known in the UK, here the twisty tale that Jono McLeod unfurls in his documentary would constitute a spoiler, so we’ll leave things vague here.  This much is fair:  in the early 1990s, a 16-year old student named Brandon Lee arrived at a Glasgow […]

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Film Festival

SHOWBUZZDAILY @ SUNDANCE 2013: “A.C.O.D.”

Posted January 24, 2013 by Mitch Salem

  Stu Zicherman’s A.C.O.D. (written by Zicherman and Ben Karlin) suffers a bit from a familiar indie comedy malady:  the conflicting desires to tell meaningful and even dark stories, while at the same time getting a studio pick-up and selling some tickets.  The result, while funny at times and incisive at times, doesn’t successfully combine both. […]

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