- Roland Emmerich blows up the world real good. Again.
- Published: Nov 13, 2009
As disaster movies go, 2012 is an over-the-top blast of pedal-to-the-metal, 100 percent unadulterated hokum. It works on the nervous system, the retinas and the gut, largely avoiding the cerebral cortex and, thankfully, the tear ducts.
- American Indian Film Festival
- Published: Nov 06, 2009
Like every other identity-oriented festival on the crowded Bay Area film calendar, the annual survey of movies by and about indigenous peoples is of substantial interest and value to nonmembers of the tribe (so to speak).
- Cinema by the Bay Preview
- Published: Oct 22, 2009
Even with all the film festivals crammed into the local calendar, there isn't room to showcase all the remarkable work by Bay Area filmmakers. Cinema by the Bay neatly plugs the gap (a little).
- Capitalism, A Love Story
- Published: Oct 02, 2009
The activist filmmaker's latest finds him less angry and contemptuous than we've ever seen him. But do we really want a kinder, gentler Michael Moore?
- The Informant!
- Published: Sep 18, 2009
The Informant! takes us into the executive suite to introduce us to the puppet masters pulling the strings of our corrupt economic system. The joke is that they aren't sleek masters of the universe but complacent Midwestern schlubs with expanding waistlines.
- World's Greatest Dad
- Published: Aug 29, 2009
Dark comedy, done properly, requires a scabrous view of human nature and a mordant affection for human fallibility. Bobcat Goldthwait is simply too nice for the job. His latest, World's Greatest Dad, has a softness at its center that leaves us with an unsatisfied appetite for blood.
- Flame & Citron
- Published: Aug 21, 2009
A disquieting movie examining the malleable nature of morality during World War II opens today. No, it's not directed by some dude named Tarantino. You're kidding, right?
- S.F. Jewish Film Festival -- 2009
- Published: Jul 23, 2009
Identity film festivals actively seek out images beyond mainstream movie and television strictures, yet typically gravitate toward positive portrayals. The SFJFF takes a more aggressive and risky approach.
- Lucrecia Martel's flesh-and-blood mysteries
- Published: Jul 13, 2009
Martel's films could be described as domestic mysteries, fraught with foreboding and crammed with casually yet carefully placed clues.
- Three Monkeys
- Published: Jun 26, 2009
For moviegoers craving engagement instead of escape, the stunningly acted Turkish domestic drama Three Monkeys is the perfect antidote to the smash-bang-kaboom blockbusters.
- Food, Inc.
- Published: Jun 12, 2009
Working in an investigative journalism tradition once honed and now abandoned by U.S. television networks, Robert Kenner's Food, Inc. is a non-sensationalist yet quietly infuriating exposé of U.S. chicken, cattle and corn production. If the phrase "essential viewing" still has any meaning, it applies to this documentary.
- S.F. International Film Festival thinks global, acts local
- Published: Apr 22, 2009
For a good many years, the S.F. International Film Festival displayed what might be called casual indifference to the output of local filmmakers. This year, the fest is loaded with Bay Area features, including the opening night selection, Peter Bratt's La Mission.
- Ben Rivers' ghostly mysteries
- Published: Mar 28, 2009
Ben Rivers cultivates an air of intrigue and mystery in his films, with no intention of providing answers or resolution. You can't accuse him of being calculating or clever, coy or cruel. Not when he's providing so much droll, delicious pleasure.
- More Than a Snack: Lunchfilm
- Published: Mar 19, 2009
The short form used to be the Rodney Dangerfield of the film world -- it couldn't get no respect.
- Shadows at Alcatraz: The Black Rock
- Published: Feb 27, 2009
Kevin Epps's selective snapshot of the African-American experience at Alcatraz, The Black Rock, pushes through the fog of history in search of shards of contemporary relevance.
- Import/Export: Seidl's negative balance of trade
- Published: Feb 12, 2009
Import/Export's numerous proofs that exploitation is the inevitable byproduct of capitalism provoke a shock of recognition, adding to the horror.
- Black as Ink: Noir City 7
- Published: Jan 23, 2009
Noir City, the annual parade of doomed hustlers, scheming femme fatales and slick nighttime streets, is nothing if not a celebration -- of grown-up style, of stained virtue, and of our own hard-won cynicism and urban smarts.
- High and Low: The Top 5 and Bottom 5 Films of 2008
- Published: Dec 26, 2008
This was a mediocre year for movies, and that's being generous. Compared to the bumper crop of outstanding films released in 2007, the last 12 months have been a dreary slog.
- Requiem for a Lightweight: Frost/Nixon
- Published: Dec 12, 2008
Ron Howard's tedious and pretentious Frost/Nixon is misconceived on so many levels, it's a tossup where to begin.
- Milk
- Published: Nov 25, 2008
There's little debate that the high-profile, star-driven Milk is not just the San Francisco movie of the year, but the decade.
- Italian For Beginners: New Italian Cinema
- Published: Nov 14, 2008
We could while away a lovely afternoon -- or start a lively comments thread -- debating why amazing debut records (The Doors and Horses, to name two) greatly outnumber brilliant first films (a list headed by Citizen Kane and The 400 Blows).
- Changeling
- Published: Oct 24, 2008
Clint Eastwood, his admirers like to say, makes old-fashioned movies with old-fashioned values. My heart swells just typing those words, but I'm not duped by nostalgia or sentimentality.
- Forbidden Lie$
- Published: Sep 18, 2008
Smart, cunning and more than a little devious, Australian filmmaker Anna Broinowski has provided a welcome reminder that every story is constructed, even those that purport to be distanced and (dare I say it) objective.
- Jean-Luc Godard: Movie Love in the Sixties
- Published: Sep 05, 2008
When Jean-Luc Godard exploded on the scene as one of the brilliant young rabble-rousers of the French New Wave, he was assuredly a man of his time.
- 9 @ Night
- Published: Aug 29, 2008
For two decades now, East Bay director Rob Nilsson has been making a particular, and particularly idiosyncratic, type of ghost story.
- 1000 Journals
- Published: Aug 04, 2008
1000 Journals, unlike most films about art and artists, has little interest in probing the mysterious process of creation.
- Viva
- Published: Jul 11, 2008
The '70s is the decade that keeps on giving. Its continued appeal, confirmed most recently by Viva, Anna Biller's amusing flip of the skirt to period sexploitation movies, is that it lends itself to a singular combination of nostalgia and condescension. We look back fondly on the '70s as a more innocent time than today, Watergate notwithstanding, but man oh man, what a compendium of fashion and decorating disasters.
- Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
- Published: Jul 05, 2008
The choice Alex Gibney faced when he set to making a documentary about writer and counterculture icon Hunter Thompson was whether to pierce the manic myth that had grown around his subject, or to carve a monument to it. He chose the latter, and a good many people will have a rollicking good time at Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. But a smaller but still sizable number will detest the multitude of self-indulgences on display, with Gibney's outstripping Thompson's.
- Encounters at the End of the World
- Published: Jun 27, 2008
Forget about Morgan Spurlock. Stand back, Michael Moore. The biggest joker making documentaries right now, believe it or not, is that wacko philosopher and German stone-face Werner Herzog. Is the world upside down, or what?
- Blasted at the Mosser Hotel
- Published: Jun 26, 2008
The play's the thing, a sage English playwright once wrote. With due respect to Sarah Kane's brutal, ambiguous text, and the brave cast of Blasted, the major reasons to check out the British theatre troupe 19:29's production at the Hotel Mosser are the location and environment.
- Frameline32
- Published: Jun 19, 2008
A great irony, or paradox, accompanies the opening of the 32nd annual San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival today. At a time when gays and lesbians are enjoying a smoother road to living satisfying, expressive lives, queer filmmakers are increasingly stymied and frustrated. So is the festival (aka Frameline32) a cause for celebration, or concern?
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
- Published: May 26, 2008
A useful question to ask about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull -- the only useful question, really, unless you have a stake in ticket, merchandise and DVD sales -- is how much factual history the movie provides in the course of its ho-hum explication of a daft plot.
- Redbelt
- Published: May 08, 2008
The only good thing that can be said about the ridiculous martial arts morality play Redbelt is that writer-director David Mamet avoids self-parody. An exercise in contrivances, con games and hokey honor that looks and sounds like a late-night basic-cable movie, the film never persuades us that anything of actual importance is going on. But Mamet somehow generates enough suspense to keep us from laughing out loud as his ludicrous story reaches its climax. One presumes he had loftier goals.
- S.F. International Film Festival 2008
- Published: Apr 24, 2008
It's only a matter of time before Americans, spooked by a bad economy and ever-scarcer resources, hunker down with their guns and religion and turn isolationist. Led by Lou Dobbs, we'll start hoarding corn and chardonnay, sealing borders, sticking our fingers in our ears and blocking out all news and culture from the outside world.
- Shine a Light/Gimme Shelter
- Published: Apr 04, 2008
The great moment of revelation in Gimme Shelter, Albert and David Maysles' 1970 portrait of the Rolling Stones tour that ended so disastrously at Altamont, was the look on Mick Jagger's face as he sat watching footage of a Hells Angel member repeatedly stabbing a man in front of the stage while the band played.
- 2008 S.F. International Asian American Film Festival
- Published: Mar 14, 2008
Sociologically speaking, every ethnic or identity-oriented film festival provides a multifaceted reflection of its community. The lineup serves as a snapshot -- incrementally different every year -- of the audience's state of mind and place.
- Girls Rock!
- Published: Mar 07, 2008
Shane King and Arne Johnson wisely set up Girls Rock!, their raucous documentary about a five-day, all-girl, Portland rock 'n' roll camp, as a hootin' 'n' hollerin' hunka swaggering female empowerment. Heaven knows we can always use a movie like that, and I wouldn't want to dampen the powder on anyone's blast at the movies. But as King and Johnson would no doubt admit (after you've bought your ticket), Girls Rock! is anything but an escapist flick.
- 2008 Indiefest Taps Into SF Iconoclasm
- Published: Feb 07, 2008
Of all the movie shindigs in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Independent Film Festival -- aka SF Indiefest -- is the funkiest. The vibe is casual, but the energy is high. The program, which commences tonight with the quasi-biblical Arkansas yarn Shotgun Stories, has a lot to do with it, of course, for truly independent movies have a handmade, anything-goes quality. But the real wild card is the audience: hordes of moviegoers in their 20s eager to embrace the unknown, the unheralded and the uncompromising.
- Noir City 6
- Published: Jan 25, 2008
The Alameda author, historian and raconteur Eddie Muller displayed a touch of genius when he elbowed the annual Noir City festival onto the January movie calendar. Winter in San Francisco is a damp, dank, spirit-snuffing affair that corresponds perfectly to the noir view of the world as an uncaring wasteland. Furthermore, our winters encourage people to go out and practice a kind of awkward communalism Â?- in bars, mostly, but also for 10 days at the Castro Â?- that's near impossible in cities with snowdrifts and sub-freezing temperatures. But surely it's more than dreary but passable weather that makes Noir City (opening Friday night, Jan. 25) one of the most popular film festivals in town, and San Francisco the noir capital of America.
- Berlin and Beyond 2008
- Published: Jan 10, 2008
It is the rare moviegoer who goes to a German film in search of laughs. That may have less to do our view of the "Teutonic temperament," though, than with what distributors think American audiences will accept. We'll happily watch French romances, costume dramas and comedies of bad manners, but typically the only German films that do well here are Nazi sagas (Downfall, Sophie Scholl) or spy dramas (The Lives of Others). Exceptions such as Run Lola Run or Mostly Martha somehow don't rouse distributors to open the gates for lighter German fare. So the Goethe-Institut, the adventurous cultural office behind the much-loved annual Berlin & Beyond series of new work from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, deserves props for choosing comedy as one of the themes of this year's program.
- Top 10 Overlooked Films of 2007
- Published: Dec 28, 2007
In lieu of a Top 10 list, which essentially invites you to put your picks against mine in an ego-fueled contest of "whose is bigger," here's a selection of worthwhile films that likely slipped past you during their brief stopover in Bay Area theaters. They might not be the "best" films of 2007, but they're all movies I could watch again in five years, or 25 years.
- Youth Without Youth
- Published: Dec 14, 2007
Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola's first foray behind the camera in a decade, is a world-class conundrum. It's an unabashedly philosophical and cerebral work by a director who once gloried in making heart-pounding, mass-market dramas. It is a personal film, and a deeply felt one, yet utterly lacking in emotional punch. Youth Without Youth is impeccably crafted, befitting a filmmaker with 45 years of experience, but it's stultifying from start to finish. Here's the final paradox: The movie looks and sounds great from moment to moment, but the whole is significantly less than the sum of its parts.
- I'm Not There
- Published: Nov 20, 2007
You've got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend. You've got a lot of nerve to allow a production designer -- alright, a filmmaker -- carte blanche to explore the meaning and mystique of one of the key artists of the last century. You've got a lot of nerve to wank around with two and a quarter hours of my time and tell me nothing I don't know. Hush a minute, I'm singing "Talking Todd Haynes Blues."
- Have You Heard From Johannesburg
- Published: Nov 01, 2007
History is what happened before we were born. At least that's what I thought in elementary school. One of the weird things about getting older is watching the events that have occurred during my lifetime morph into subsequent generations' history. Nothing brings that home quite like Have You Heard From Johannesburg: Apartheid and the Club of the West, which revisits the U.S. anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and '80s. Didn't that just happen? Isn't it way too soon, and those events too fresh, to be the subject of a historical film? Or might we discern, by some stretch of the imagination, a kernel of relevance to the present?
- Mill Valley's Sweet Smell of Success
- Published: Oct 05, 2007
With due respect for the provocative lineup assembled every year by its stellar programmers, what attracts me to the Mill Valley Film Festival is the ambiance. The sunlight feels a little softer than it does in the city, and I bask in the scent of cashmere, coffee and corduroy.
- SF DocFest 2007
- Published: Sep 27, 2007
Everything I know I learned from documentaries. You think I'm kidding, don't you? Watching movies is less time-consuming than reading, entails less initiative than doing research and requires fewer social skills than talking to experts. But those productive hours are becoming a thing of the past. The amount of actual, factual information in the typical documentary, like the amount of nutrition in the average acre of bio-engineered crops, is steadily decreasing. The goal of most doc makers is no longer to provide data or context, but to capture and convey a thick slice of experience. Using tiny portable camcorders that put the viewer smack in the middle of the action, they deliver a vicarious thrill -- a rush of danger, of voyeurism -- that's stimulating but ultimately safe. It's irresistible, I have to admit, and nobody understands that better than the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, or DocFest.
- Strange Culture
- Published: Sep 21, 2007
The pioneering San Francisco video artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman has made the most flat-out accessible work of her career with the Kafkaesque documentary Strange Culture. "Accessible" is often criticspeak for "sellout," but not in this case. For one thing, the relentlessly intellectually probing Hershman is frankly incapable of serving up lollipops for the mainstream. But she realized that the urgency of her subject -- the Federal government's chilling prosecution/persecution of respected East Coast artist/professor Steve Kurtz -- made it imperative that Strange Culture be seen by as many people as possible. That the film succeeds as both an iconoclastic piece of art and as compelling drama, is rather amazing.
- Revolution Summer
- Published: Aug 31, 2007
On the title track of his 1984 album Voice of America, the unabashedly political rocker Little Steven (aka "Miami" Steve of the E Street Band, aka Silvio Dante on The Sopranos, aka Steve Van Zandt) demanded, "Can you hear me, wake up/Where's the voice of America?" Alas, he had little success rousing the Reagan-era silent majority against such outrages as the murders of innocents (with our help) in Chile, Argentina and Nicaragua. (Not the standard stuff of rock lyrics, which might explain why Van Zandt's solo career was abbreviated.) Two decades later, in the midst of a disastrous and unpopular war, America's conscience is still hibernating. This is the climate, or condition, if you prefer, that spawned Revolution Summer.
- Melville's Le Doulos
- Published: Aug 17, 2007
Hard-boiled French director Jean Pierre Melville
has enjoyed an unexpected posthumous revival in recent
years with the rediscovery and re-release of the '50s
and '60s underworld masterpieces Bob le
Flambeur, Le Samourai and Army of
Shadows. Just in case the crime-doesn't-pay maxim somehow
hasn't penetrated our dense craniums,
Le Doulos, another shimmeringly gorgeous and
defiantly grim tale, comes our way this Friday for a
week-long stay at the Castro Theatre.
- 2007 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival
- Published: Jul 20, 2007
Immigration, assimilation, food, the Holocaust, identity, music, Israel and the Palestinians, secularism vs. ultra-religiosity, comedy, social justice, intermarriage and unfettered, full-throated kvetching -- that's the Jewish experience in the 20th Century in a nutshell. Seven years into the new century, I don't sense any dramatic changes in the recipe. Nor does the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which has assembled a hefty, broad and far-reaching program that embraces all the above themes, along with a heaping helping of sex.
- Ten Canoes and Rescue Dawn: Offbeat Anti-War Films
- Published: Jul 13, 2007
In the atypical war movies Ten Canoes and Rescue Dawn, nature is ever-present as witness, as accessory, as enemy. The ostensibly primitive people in Ten Canoes, a marvelous Aboriginal fable directed by Rolf de Heer and set a millennium ago, connect their existence and their spirituality to the land. The hero of Werner Herzog's gripping P.O.W. escape movie Rescue Dawn, set 40 years ago in southeast Asia, finds it a tougher challenge surviving the jungle than surmounting his captors.
- Gypsy Caravan
- Published: Jul 09, 2007
Jasmine Dellal's magnificent music film, Gypsy Caravan, hits the rare daily double of being supremely entertaining AND socially conscious. A record of a six-week tour of five geographically and musically disparate bands -- whose common link is that they all trace their lineage in some way to the Romani, or Gypsy people -- the movie is an endlessly surprising portrait of a culture that I (and maybe you, too) had assumed was defined by and limited to Eastern Europe. Before we forge further into ethnic, ethnographic and sociological territory, though, I want to make plain that Gypsy Caravan is, first and foremost, a superb concert flick.
- Frameline 31: Searching for gems at the SF Int'l LGBT FF
- Published: Jun 14, 2007
The San Francisco International LGBT Festival, aka Frameline31, is far and away the biggest hodge-podge on the Bay Area film calendar. This is the place to go if you enjoy the flea-market approach of rooting around for gems, or crave seeing your non-mainstream identity or experience projected on the big screen. For a lot of folks, what's onscreen is occasionally secondary to the pleasure of sitting (or cruising) in a theater full of people with shared orientation, values or even sorrows.
- Worlds Unseen: Ellen Bruno
- Published: Jun 07, 2007
Documentaries were defined in this country as "educational films" for the longest time, largely because entire generations were first exposed to prosaic nonfiction films in grammar school. If that view still holds sway in pockets of the U.S. -- and it does, unfortunately -- we have Ken Burns' historically valuable and ponderously formulaic PBS opuses to thank.
- Guy Maddin: Brand Upon the Brain!
- Published: May 12, 2007
Buried near the end of my last post, a lengthy preview of the S.F. International Film Festival, was a heads-up about the special presentation of Guy Maddin's ambitious extravaganza, Brand Upon the Brain!. Although I was enthusiastic in my recommendation, I wasn't off-my-meds hysterical, jumping up and down, shrieking in capital letters. I apologize. Because those who were at the Castro this past Monday night (May 7) had the abundant pleasure of experiencing the movie highlight of the year.
- The San Francisco International Film Festival Hits the Big Five-Oh
- Published: Apr 27, 2007
The role and relevance of the S.F. International Film Festival has become a topic of discussion in recent years, as its 50th anniversary came into view on the horizon. The world has changed just a wee bit in half a century, and the SFIFF was slow to acknowledge the altered landscape. A plethora of local fests vie for our attention year-round, for one thing, while younger audiences are migrating from theaters to home video and laptop viewing. There's also this newfangled doohickey called the Internet, which (among other things) is acclimating people to watching videos in a 2 x 2-inch box.
The current SFIFF management is alert to all three factors -- great news for the fest's long-term prospects -- and it also holds a pair of aces that we tend to overlook: it is the most prestigious film event in town, and it has more resources than anybody else.
- Mike White: Deceptively Simple
- Published: Apr 19, 2007
The splendid films written by Mike White, notably Chuck and Buck and The Good Girl, are deceptively simple. Or maybe they're deceptively complex. I get those two mixed up. But you know what I mean: There's more to them than meets the eye.
- Is Martin Scorsese all that?
- Published: Apr 03, 2007
The extended coronation of Martin Scorsese as the greatest living American moviemaker reached its climax with his Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed. As a minority of one, I have a confession to make: I'd much rather listen to Scorsese talk about movies than sit through one he directed.
