Salon.com > Our Picks http://www.salon.com Wed, 03 Jul 2013 01:14:35 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 “The Lone Ranger”: Rip-roaring adventure meets dark political parable http://www.salon.com/2013/07/02/the_lone_ranger_rip_roaring_adventure_meets_dark_political_parable/ http://www.salon.com/2013/07/02/the_lone_ranger_rip_roaring_adventure_meets_dark_political_parable/#comments Tue, 02 Jul 2013 22:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13349700 If you’re looking for an old-fashioned, rip-roaring western adventure, with dashing heroes, dastardly villains and beautiful girls, where you know who the good guys and bad guys are and you’re not troubled by historical guilt or contradiction – well, Gore Verbinski’s re-engineering of “The Lone Ranger” is not that movie. Actually, let me take that back, or at least rephrase it: This mordant and ambitious work of pop-political craftsmanship both is and is not that movie. It delivers, for my money, the most exciting action sequence in any of this summer’s big spectacles (even counting the destruction of Tony Stark’s Malibu mansion in “Iron Man 3”), a delirious chase-and-fight number staged on board a moving train – set, of course, to the William Tell Overture – that’s equal parts stunt work, digital effects and cinematic derring-do. But it also never lets you forget that the Manifest Destiny that drove Anglo-American society across our continent was a thin veneer pasted across a series of genocidal crimes.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/07/02/the_lone_ranger_rip_roaring_adventure_meets_dark_political_parable/feed/ 21 Pick of the week: The mind-blowing black punk band from 1974 http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/pick_of_the_week_the_mind_blowing_black_punk_band_from_1974/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/pick_of_the_week_the_mind_blowing_black_punk_band_from_1974/#comments Fri, 28 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13339336 We already know about the economic and political history of Detroit as the home of the most iconic American industry, the site of the most extreme urban decay in the country and ground zero for 21st-century DIY urban homesteading. We also know about the Motor City’s unique importance in American pop-culture history as the birthplace of Motown, a breeding ground for house and techno music, and the town that produced Iggy and the Stooges, the MC5, Eminem and Kid Rock. (OK, never mind about Kid Rock.) Last year’s Oscar-winning documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” told the strange but true story of Rodriguez, the Detroit-born Latino singer-songwriter who became a huge star in South Africa without even knowing it. Given all that discord, ferment, chrome and vitality, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that three African-American brothers in Detroit created punk rock before it actually existed. Next you’re gonna tell me that sex, marijuana and the movies were invented in Detroit too.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/28/pick_of_the_week_the_mind_blowing_black_punk_band_from_1974/feed/ 11 “I’m So Excited!”: An air disaster, made fabulous http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/im_so_excited_an_air_disaster_made_fabulous/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/im_so_excited_an_air_disaster_made_fabulous/#comments Wed, 26 Jun 2013 19:53:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13338023 There’s close to zero explicit political content in Pedro Almodóvar’s “I’m So Excited!”, but in its own way the veteran Spanish filmmaker’s latest work is the perfect way to celebrate a landmark week for the cause of freedom and equality. A romantic and erotic fantasy largely set among the passengers and crew of a possibly doomed airplane (the Spanish title is simply “Los amantes pasajeros”), “I’m So Excited!” deliberately recalls the exuberant and outrageous cinema that first put Almodóvar, and the hedonistic cultural scene of post-Franco Spain, on the global map in the early ‘80s.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/im_so_excited_an_air_disaster_made_fabulous/feed/ 2 “How to Make Money Selling Drugs”: The war America keeps on losing http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/how_to_make_money_selling_drugs_the_war_america_keeps_on_losing/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/how_to_make_money_selling_drugs_the_war_america_keeps_on_losing/#comments Wed, 26 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13336804 Despite its slick packaging and overtly facetious premise, director Matthew Cooke and producer Adrian Grenier’s faux-educational documentary “How to Make Money Selling Drugs” packs a wallop. While imparting lessons about the economic realities of the drug trade – a thriving, booming and ever-diversifying realm of entrepreneurial capitalism, in spite of the massively expensive attempt to shut it down – Cooke’s film reminds us that America’s destructive global misadventures of the last 20 years have a corollary that’s every bit as bad right here at home.

If anything, the “war on drugs” has been even worse and even stupider than the “war on terror,” although they’ve become so intimately interconnected in moral, technological and philosophical terms that it’s not like we get to choose. America’s police departments have been increasingly transformed into thousands of high-tech paramilitary squads, just as our overseas military operations have become ever more defined by special-forces ops and targeted assassinations. Seeing cops in middle-size heartland communities driving armored personnel carriers would almost be comical, if it didn’t so often lead to incompetent and illegal home invasions in which the wrong people are arrested, injured or killed. (Wrong-address police break-ins happen several times a week in the United States, according to an attorney seen in the film.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/26/how_to_make_money_selling_drugs_the_war_america_keeps_on_losing/feed/ 44 Pick of the week: Hijacked by Somali pirates http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/pick_of_the_week_hijacked_by_somali_pirates/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/pick_of_the_week_hijacked_by_somali_pirates/#comments Thu, 20 Jun 2013 23:59:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13332371 If the relentless Danish piracy thriller “A Hijacking” were an American movie, or had been made in English – some of it is in English, actually, since that’s the international language of diplomacy, extortion and blackmail – it would be widely proclaimed as one of the best films of the year. But that’s essentially a ludicrous thing to say, since no mainstream American thriller could ever be made about this subject that resisted simple-minded narrative clichés the way “A Hijacking” does, or that refused to depict its characters as either heroes or villains.

In essence, Tobias Lindholm’s film is a corporate thriller, a story of the business world that explores both the backroom deal-making and its effects on ordinary people. In this case, the deal involves ransom negotiations to free the crew of a Danish cargo vessel that’s been commandeered by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. But for buttoned-down CEO Peter Ludvigsen (Søren Malling) back in Copenhagen, the negotiating tactics are no different from the ones he’s just used to drive down the price of a deal with a Japanese partner. As for the pirates themselves, they’re a well-known risk in doing business in that part of the world. Sometimes you have to bribe corrupt officials, sometimes you pay millions to consultants who do nothing, and sometimes you deal with pirates. They are practicing capitalism by other means.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/pick_of_the_week_hijacked_by_somali_pirates/feed/ 5 “The Attack”: I married a suicide bomber http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/the_attack_i_married_a_suicide_bomber/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/the_attack_i_married_a_suicide_bomber/#comments Thu, 20 Jun 2013 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13332178 At the beginning of “The Attack,” a film by Lebanese-American director Ziad Doueiri that’s adapted from a bestselling novel by Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra, Dr. Amin Jaafari seems to have it all. More than that, Amin seems to embody the possibilities of a new Middle East. He’s both an Arab and an Israeli, a secular Muslim from the Occupied Territories who is now a full-fledged Israeli citizen and a respected surgeon at an elite Tel Aviv hospital. (Indeed, the actor who plays him, 36-year-old Ali Suliman, has a similar biography: Born in Nazareth and educated at a leading acting school in Tel Aviv, he has worked in Britain, Hollywood and Israel.)

But that vision of a Middle East beyond bigotry and warfare is in many ways an illusion. That’s the vital and essential delicacy of “The Attack”: Doueiri, himself a child of the Lebanese civil war who grew up to become a cameraman for Quentin Tarantino and now a filmmaker in his own right, believes in the possibility suggested by people like Amin, but also understands its difficulties and pitfalls all too well. He violated both Lebanese law and long-standing Arab custom by making a film in Israel, one that acknowledges that Israelis are human beings rather than monsters, and now the only way his own people will see his film is by way of pirated DVDs and YouTube clips.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/the_attack_i_married_a_suicide_bomber/feed/ 1 A head trip to a haunted recording studio http://www.salon.com/2013/06/18/a_head_trip_to_a_haunted_recording_studio/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/18/a_head_trip_to_a_haunted_recording_studio/#comments Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13329115 In one direction, British writer-director Peter Strickland’s peculiar and powerful movie-geek head trip “Berberian Sound Studio” is a tribute to the gothic and grotesque Italian horror-thriller genre of the ‘70s and ‘80s often called “giallo.” (In Italian, that word is applied to any kind of crime thriller, regardless of origin; the local variety is often called “thrilling all’Italiana.”) It’s about a mousy English sound engineer called Gilderoy, played by the always-terrific Toby Jones, who is hired, under mysterious circumstances, to come to Italy to work on an especially gruesome sub-Dario Argento giallo titled “The Equestrian Vortex,” which seems to involve Satanism, human sacrifice, rape by goblin and lavish scenes of inquisitors torturing witches.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/18/a_head_trip_to_a_haunted_recording_studio/feed/ 6 Pick of the week: Fighting the world’s worst homophobia http://www.salon.com/2013/06/13/pick_of_the_week_fighting_the_worlds_worst_homophobia/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/13/pick_of_the_week_fighting_the_worlds_worst_homophobia/#comments Thu, 13 Jun 2013 23:59:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13325926 If the moving, shocking and ultimately inspiring documentary “Call Me Kuchu” is about the struggle for gay rights in the African nation of Uganda, where a combination of evangelical Christianity and anti-Western resentment has produced a uniquely toxic climate of institutional homophobia and public hate speech, it’s also about something much larger than that. This urgent eyewitness account of an activist struggle amid extremely dangerous conditions has all the heroes, villains, twists and turns of a political thriller. It’s a tale of hatred, hope and enormous courage, and a lesson in the contradictions of post-colonial Africa. It’s a story about the way we live now, in our suddenly interconnected world, and one that dares to imagine how we might live in the future. It’s a love story and a story of martyrdom, both of them heartbreaking. I’ll be surprised if any other movie this year affects me as much.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/13/pick_of_the_week_fighting_the_worlds_worst_homophobia/feed/ 7 Pick of the week: Joss Whedon does Shakespeare http://www.salon.com/2013/06/06/pick_of_the_week_joss_whedon_does_shakespeare/ http://www.salon.com/2013/06/06/pick_of_the_week_joss_whedon_does_shakespeare/#comments Thu, 06 Jun 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13319193 Shakespeare scholars didn’t take “Much Ado About Nothing” seriously for many years, partly just because it’s a comedy that lacks the death and dread factor of “Hamlet” or “Lear” or “Macbeth” and partly – I’m not kidding – because the title led some to conclude that the Bard rated it pretty low himself. But there’s a reason why it’s among the most widely produced of Shakespeare comedies, and why Joss Whedon has produced a DIY, no-budget American film version, set at an all-night party in contemporary California, even though the much-beloved Kenneth Branagh-Emma Thompson production from 1993 is readily available.

Despite its focus on the importance of female purity and chastity that seems just a wee bit out of step with 21st-century morality, “Much Ado About Nothing” offers a wonderfully contemporary pair of sparring lovers who believe themselves ill-matched but are of course made for each other. Shakespeare didn’t invent this pattern, to be sure, but his Beatrice and Benedick anticipate Jane Austen and the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn movies and “Moonlighting” and pretty much every screwball-type romance ever devised. (Including the clear suggestion in the text that these two have already been lovers who couldn’t stand each other and broke up, which becomes explicit in Whedon’s version.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/06/06/pick_of_the_week_joss_whedon_does_shakespeare/feed/ 12 Pick of the week: Inside an “eco-terror” cell http://www.salon.com/2013/05/31/pick_of_the_week_inside_an_eco_terror_cell/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/31/pick_of_the_week_inside_an_eco_terror_cell/#comments Fri, 31 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13313160 In the new indie thriller “The East,” Brit Marling – a tall and severe-looking blonde who’s carving out an unconventional career as an actress and screenwriter – plays a secret agent named Jane who is sent undercover into an organization widely seen as a terrorist group. From that familiar genre-movie setup, “The East” pursues its own path: Jane tells her boyfriend that she’s flying from Washington to Dubai, but instead she leaves the airport, changes from business wear into scruffy clothes and makes her way here and there via bicycle and freight train and ride-sharing, eventually landing in a rural commune near Pittsburgh.

“The East,” which is co-written by Marling and director Zal Batmanglij, adroitly suspends judgment both about Jane (who renames herself Sarah) and about the anarchist or “eco-terrorist” collective she penetrates, which is presented neither as a creepazoid cult nor as unambiguously heroic. Ultimately I think the story could do with a clearer and more passionate point of view; it’s as if the icy, rational detachment Marling projects as an actress also defines the worldview defined by the script and Batmanglij’s directorial choices. But at its best “The East” comes close to being the morally murky film about anti-corporate resistance that we (or at least I) have been waiting for.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/31/pick_of_the_week_inside_an_eco_terror_cell/feed/ 19 Alex Gibney: Julian Assange has become like “those he despises” http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/alex_gibney_julian_assange_has_become_like_those_he_despises/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/alex_gibney_julian_assange_has_become_like_those_he_despises/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 16:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13302064 So Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning director of “Taxi to the Dark Side,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and many other political and social documentaries, has made a fascinating film about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks that has already pissed off a lot of people on the left – and is about to piss off a bunch more. “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks” portrays the Australian hacker-hero Assange as a flawed and complicated figure. As British journalist Nick Davies puts it in the film, the same extraordinary personality who created WikiLeaks is also the one who destroyed it. On one hand, Assange has led the fight for freedom of information in the asymmetrical conflict between the world’s citizens and fearsome Goliaths like the CIA and the Pentagon. On the other, he has allowed his alarming personal failings and his persecution complex to become much too large a part of the story, and has succumbed to what one source in the film calls “noble cause corruption.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/18/alex_gibney_julian_assange_has_become_like_those_he_despises/feed/ 78 Pick of the week: Sarah Polley’s family secrets http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/pick_of_the_week_sarah_polleys_family_secrets/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/pick_of_the_week_sarah_polleys_family_secrets/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 22:55:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13294108 Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” is two or maybe three dangerous kinds of movies all at the same time, and handled so brilliantly that the result is a transformative, unforgettable work of art. This documentary about Polley’s own surprising family secrets -- which includes some sneaky fictional or imaginative elements -- might sound at first like a personal indulgence but becomes something much larger and subtler: A gripping investigation of the ultimately unknowable past, a meditation on how and whether we can actually know anything, and an act of profound love and generosity. That generosity extends not just to the members of Polley’s WASPy Canadian family – although you certainly feel that – but also to the audience. I left the theater thinking not just about Polley’s family secrets but my own, for which of us truly knows where we came from, or what unrecoverable stories of love and heartbreak lie in our prehistory?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/09/pick_of_the_week_sarah_polleys_family_secrets/feed/ 6 What we missed: Steve Coogan and Julianne Moore’s bitter divorce http://www.salon.com/2013/05/08/what_we_missed_steve_coogan_and_julianne_moores_bitter_divorce/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/08/what_we_missed_steve_coogan_and_julianne_moores_bitter_divorce/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13292131 It’s probably best to approach Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s intimate, unnerving and entirely addictive drama “What Maisie Knew” by not leaning too hard on its Henry James source material. While readers of James’ brief and brilliant 1897 novel will surely spot and enjoy the numerous parallels and points of connection, this is an absorbing 21st-century childhood thriller – not a contradiction in terms, I promise – that requires no literary study.

Maisie (the remarkable Onata Aprile, who has just the right combination of slyness and shyness) is a girl of 7 or 8, of the pampered yet neglected sort that’s entirely too common in Manhattan and other metropolitan locales. Her parents are a debauched rock star named Susanna (ruthlessly nailed by Julianne Moore), who has slid past her expiration date without noticing it, and a pompous English art dealer named Beale (Steve Coogan), who may be worse, since he’s wilier and more manipulative. Their custody battle drags Maisie through a half-understood world of nannies, private schools and courtrooms, mostly seen from her perspective.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/08/what_we_missed_steve_coogan_and_julianne_moores_bitter_divorce/feed/ 4 Pick of the week: I was a teenage anarchist! http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/pick_of_the_week_i_was_a_teenage_anarchist/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/pick_of_the_week_i_was_a_teenage_anarchist/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 23:30:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13288181 “Something in the Air” tells the story of a French teenager caught up in the half-crazy early-‘70s climate of political radicalism and artistic experimentation, an era that can seem so far from our own as to be a science-fiction alternate reality. It’s a terrific film, wonderfully atmospheric and alive, but also a curiously appropriate one to encounter right now, as we deal with the aftermath of a cruel and pointless crime apparently committed in the name of some abstract revolutionary ideal. Writer-director Olivier Assayas (of “Summer Hours” and the terrific terrorist miniseries “Carlos”), one of the leading figures in French cinema, has described this movie as generally autobiographical. While Assayas’ young protagonist and his anarchist pals never come to the point of blowing up civilians, they get pretty close, and indeed avoid committing murder mostly through luck. Is this a true story? I obviously have no idea, but it’s a convincing and disturbing one.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/02/pick_of_the_week_i_was_a_teenage_anarchist/feed/ 17 “Post Tenebras Lux”: A perverse, dreamlike masterpiece http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/post_tenebras_lux_a_perverse_dreamlike_masterpiece/ http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/post_tenebras_lux_a_perverse_dreamlike_masterpiece/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 15:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13286687 A mesmerizing combination of opaque art-house cinema, personal reflection and class-based rural thriller, Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ “Post Tenebras Lux” casts a strange and powerful spell. While this is certainly a challenging film on many levels, and one rooted in observation of the natural world, it isn’t one of those drifty contemplative Terrence Malick spectacles where nothing much happens. It’s just that many of the events are puzzling and disconnected, and you have to work out for yourself the allusive or subterranean relationship between them. There’s a neon-red animated demon who invades a family’s home at night, a shooting, a hilarious and heartbreaking rural A.A. meeting, a visit to a perverted sex club and a guilt-ridden killer who commits suicide in the most spectacular fashion imaginable. It’s as if we were sometimes in the world of David Lynch, sometimes in the world of Stanley Kubrick and a whole lot of the time in the world of Andrei Tarkovsky, with the complicated social tragedy of Mexico ladled on top.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/05/01/post_tenebras_lux_a_perverse_dreamlike_masterpiece/feed/ 6 “Love Is All You Need”: Pierce Brosnan’s lovely, lightweight rom-com http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_is_all_you_need_pierce_brosnans_lovely_lightweight_romcom/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_is_all_you_need_pierce_brosnans_lovely_lightweight_romcom/#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13285820 Danish director Susanne Bier has spent her career stuck in the mushy European middle, halfway between Ingmar Bergman and Hollywood. She has a tremendous gift for character and storytelling, coupled with a penchant for preachy, melodramatic message delivery in the Paul Haggis vein, especially as her films have attracted a global audience. She won the foreign-language Oscar for the Euro-guilt odyssey “In a Better World” in 2010 – a picture that was conspicuously trying to be meaningful – and has made one semi-unsuccessful American venture, the 2007 “Things We Lost in the Fire,” with Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/love_is_all_you_need_pierce_brosnans_lovely_lightweight_romcom/feed/ 4 Pick of the week: Michael Bay’s self-mocking crime farce http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/pick_of_the_week_michael_bays_self_mocking_crime_farce/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/pick_of_the_week_michael_bays_self_mocking_crime_farce/#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13282238 With his pumped-up and violent crime farce “Pain & Gain” – a thoroughly reprehensible and frequently hilarious satire that depicts American life as a circus of stupidity, artificiality and self-regard -- Michael Bay sends a clear message to those of us who’ve been making fun of him: He’s been in on the joke the whole time. I can think of a variety of responses to this, but they all basically boil down to “Yeah, so what else is new?”

There has always been a powerful current of self-mockery, or at least self-awareness, in Bay’s ludicrous “Transformers” movies, which embraced bigness, loudness, dumbness, visual incoherence and cartoonish female pulchritude (see: Fox, Megan, entire career of) as central formal elements and stylistic first principles. I wasn’t the only critic to observe that Bay’s enormous 2011 hit, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” had elements of avant-garde surrealism and elements of high camp, and could be described as a “performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment.”

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/26/pick_of_the_week_michael_bays_self_mocking_crime_farce/feed/ 27 “At Any Price”: Zac Efron and Dennis Quaid’s Corn Belt thriller http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/at_any_price_zac_efron_and_dennis_quaids_corn_belt_thriller/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/at_any_price_zac_efron_and_dennis_quaids_corn_belt_thriller/#comments Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13280336 Movies about so-called ordinary people in the American heartland, even when they’re pretty good, tend to be driven by a reflexive and almost guilty sentimentality. Even the hardened, cynical coastal types who make films don’t want to challenge the national myth that life in rural America possesses a realness absent in more metropolitan surroundings. There’s some genuine history behind that myth, in the sense that over the course of the 20th century the nation’s population and economy permanently shifted away from the agrarian republic imagined by the founders, but a great many of us have rural roots in the not-too-distant past. One of my grandfathers was an Irish immigrant, but the other was born in a prairie town I’ve never even visited, to a father who sold Case tractors.

One of the best things about Ramin Bahrani’s bracing farmland thriller “At Any Price” is its refusal to condescend to the Iowa farm family at its center by depicting them as nobler, more innocent and less sophisticated than other people. Many people who see this movie will be understandably focused on Zac Efron’s intense performance as Dean Whipple, the family’s handsome but embittered youngest son who yearns to be a stock-car driver. But for me the breakthrough in “At Any Price” comes from 59-year-old Dennis Quaid, cementing his character-actor renaissance with what may be the nastiest role of his career.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/at_any_price_zac_efron_and_dennis_quaids_corn_belt_thriller/feed/ 5 Pick of the week: “Oblivion,” Tom Cruise’s gorgeous sci-fi allegory http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/#comments Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:00:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13275381 Science fiction is always more about the present, and even the past, than it is about the future, which by definition we don’t know anything about. That’s certainly true of “Oblivion,” the sly, surprising and visually magnificent Tom Cruise vehicle that has forced me – and many other people, I suspect – to revise my first opinion of director Joseph Kosinski. In fact, on some bizarre level “Oblivion” feels like a more grown-up and vastly improved version of Kosinski’s murky and ludicrous “TRON: Legacy,” a movie I compared to sticking your head into a barrel of ink full of fluorescent glow-sticks.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/19/pick_of_the_week_oblivion_tom_cruises_gorgeous_sci_fi_allegory/feed/ 20 Tribeca Film Festival: The 10 hottest movies http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/tribeca_film_festival_the_10_hottest_movies/ http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/tribeca_film_festival_the_10_hottest_movies/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:15:00 +0000 http://www.railrode.net/?p=13274179 Born a dozen years ago in the wake of a major tragedy, the Tribeca Film Festival finds its opening week this year tinged with trauma as well. Yes, the show will go on, with the glitz and the headlines more than a little subdued by the painful news from Boston – but what kind of show is it? Tribeca is now established as a cornerstone event of New York’s spring cultural season, but still lacks a clear role in the movie world’s ecology. It’s not a major market festival where films are bought and sold, in the vein of Cannes or Sundance, it’s not a Hollywood/Indiewood showcase, like Toronto, and it’s not a celebration of DIY or low-budget ingenuity, like South by Southwest. In part, Tribeca has always been a hometown festival for the Manhattan-centric indie film world, but that’s no longer the same hot concept it was in 2001, when Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff announced a new film festival aimed at getting downtown Manhattan back on its feet in the wake of 9/11.

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