Critic’s Pick of the Week: Caught in the Web reviewed by Armond White for CityArts

By Armond White Unlike David Fincher’s The Social Network, which burnished the legend of Mark Zuckerberg founding Facebook while glamourizing the modern derangement of social values and personal relations, Chen Kaige gets directly to the social, spiritual point in his masterly new film Caught in the Web. Chen balances a …

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire burnt by Armond White for CityArts

By Armond White Funny how The Hunger Games franchise pretends to deal with political demogoguery but really just gives audiences dumbed-down Bread-and-Circuses–the standard millennial trap. By the time Philip Seymour Hoffman enters The Hunger Games: Catching Fire with his usual post-Oscar smugness, viewers are so worn out from the brackish …

Dallas Buyers Club audited by Armond White for CityArts

By Armond White How do you tell Ron Woodroof’s story so that it is both informative and enlightening? Woodroof, a not-altruistic Texas shitkicker who drank, drugged, chased tail and conned people, contracted AIDS in the mid-80s then became a self-made entrepreneur. He rejected the prescribed drug AZT (a prophetic decision), …

Critics Pick: Dormant Beauty reviewed by Armond White for CityArts

By Armond White If Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte opened today, it would be the best film of 2013–and the most relevant. Though originally released in 1962, Antonioni’s masterpiece speaks to the crisis of affluence and license that also describes our contemporary social conundrum where the acceptance of capitalist privilege (and …

The Counselor disbarred by Armond White for CityArts

By Armond White Novelist Cormac McCarthy must have been a fan of Breaking Bad since he steals its byzantine plot–its essence–for The Counselor, the film billed as his “first original screenplay.” The combination cynicism-and-pretense that motivates this crime film about a lawyer (Michael Fassbender) who gains wealth from assisting clients …

Critic’s Pick of the Week: Capital reviewed by Armond White for CityArts

By Armond White In a third of the time it took Olivier Assayas to turn 70s terrorism into a epic hipster rave (replete with post-punk soundtrack) in Carlos, Costa-Gavras exposes the nature of social and financial compromise–moral terrorism–in Capital. This timely story of how Phenix Bank, a French financial institution, …

Shaved Dud of the Week: Blue is the Warmest Color trounced by Armond White for CityArts

By Armond White The New York Film Festival’s presentation of Blue is the Warmest Color repeats the Cannes slate along with such repulsive Festival-circuit fare like Jia Zhangke’s odious A Touch of Sin. Now we know what Spielberg, Hollywood director par excellence, was up against. Here’s how I suss out …

Carrie remake reviewed by Armond White for CityArts

By Armond White It was impossible for Kimberly Peirce to direct a remake of Carrie that could live up to Brian DePalma’s 1976 original. Two cultural events got in the way. First, political correctness so dominates our culture that the mythological aspects in Carrie’s reverse-Cinderella story (a repressed, unpopular high …

Dud of the Week; 12 Years A Slave reviewed by Armond White for CityArts

By Armond White Brutality, violence and misery get confused with history in 12 Years a Slave, British director Steve McQueen’s adaptation of the 1853 American slave narrative by Solomon Northup, who claims that in 1841, away from his home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., he was kidnapped and taken South where …

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