- The San Francisco International Animation Festival
- Published: Nov 11, 2009
It's PR-speak but it's also true that this little festival "celebrates San Francisco's prominence as a hub for one of the most creative cinematic forms."
- Kevin Smith at the Warfield
- Published: Oct 30, 2009
Kevin Smith, everyone's favorite chubby, foul-mouthed, bespectacled Jersey boy is coming to the Warfield for some stand-up. Will he actually speak or will he show up as Silent Bob?
- Where the Wild Things Are
- Published: Oct 18, 2009
A classic by all accounts, and an unimprovable symbiosis of content and form, Maurice Sendak's 1963 children's book Where the Wild Things Are ranks high among "Oh no they didn't" fodder for movie adaptation.
- Visible Histories
- Published: Oct 17, 2009
What do author Eric Lyle (On the Lower Frequencies), Oscar-nominated local documentarian Sam Green, and Oregon filmmaker Vanessa Renwick have in common with Carl Sagan? Find out tonight at Other Cinema.
- Mill Valley Film Festival
- Published: Oct 08, 2009
They call it the launching pad for the Oscar campaign. I don't know who "they" are, but that's what they call it. Which means classy! But cozy classy (as opposed to, you know, slickly obsequious) because that's how the Mill Valley Film Festival rolls.
- Andrew Bujalski's Beeswax, Pros and Cons
- Published: Sep 11, 2009
Still wondering what ordinary, educated middle class people do with themselves after college? Writer-director Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation) has made another bewitching and potentially infuriating understatement on that subject, called Beeswax.
- A Brief Glossary of British Crime
- Published: Sep 03, 2009
Possibly the most brilliantly titled series in Pacific Film Archive history, Tea and Larceny: Classic British Crime Films imports 15 peppy, charismatic movies full of mayhem, murder, betrayal, depravity and occasional references to language and customs that Americans may find unfamiliar.
- Sita Sings the Blues
- Published: Aug 26, 2009
While Nina Paley's animated feature film debut, Sita Sings the Blues, can be viewed online, the best way to see it is on a big screen, in a dark room, with other people. There are monkey armies, flying eyeballs, dancing gods and breaking hearts.
- Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo
- Published: Aug 22, 2009
In the annals of moviemaking catastrophe -- from Apocalypse Now to Cleopatra, Heaven's Gate to Waterworld -- perhaps no famously troubled production has been more copiously documented than Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.
- Rock 'Til You Drop
- Published: Aug 07, 2009
Would it not be fun and diverting and rocking and possibly profound to spend an evening with the younger, bushier-tailed versions of Paula Abdul, Keanu Reeves, Val Kilmer and Lou Reed?
- Soul Power
- Published: Jul 18, 2009
It must have been a simpler time. Everyone seemed so naturally sexy, even wearing the most atrocious synthetics.
- Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus
- Published: Jul 05, 2009
Yes, there's a movie called Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus. And I've watched it, all the way from start to finish. I actually bought the DVD.
- Tetro
- Published: Jun 19, 2009
There was a moment in local film titan Francis Ford Coppola's self-released new movie, not long after its stylish opening credits, when I thought, "Wait: Are we in for two hours of slamming doors and soprano sax? Uh oh."
- It Came from Kuchar
- Published: Jun 18, 2009
For those familiar with the subjects of Jennifer Kroot's new documentary, It Came from Kuchar, the title will seem keenly apt. Others may wonder, "Just what is this 'Kuchar' of which she speaks? What comes from it? Should I be worried?"
- Better living through Another Hole in the Head
- Published: Jun 05, 2009
It may seem hard to believe, but the annual Another Hole in the Head film festival, an offshoot of SF Indie, has many valuable life lessons to impart. Gory, deviant, shocking and variously disgusting life lessons, sure, but that's why they're useful.
- Quality Control: Selected Works from Zaentz Films
- Published: May 30, 2009
Saul Zaentz came up through Berkeley's Fantasy Records, made a mint by spotting and signing Creedence Clearwater Revival, leapt into a singular, artisanal and exacting film-production concern, bucked the studio trend of boring bottom-line-ism and gradually accumulated a heap of congratulatory hardware from the Academy.
- I WAKE UP DREAMING: The Haunted World of the B Film Noir!
- Published: May 15, 2009
You might need to take a shower and go to confession after I WAKE UP DREAMING: The Haunted World of the B Film Noir!, but that's the seedy beauty of it.
- Star Trek
- Published: May 08, 2009
Abrams' appropriately funny, silly and exciting new take on Star Trek clearly understands its original mission objectives, and puts extra emphasis on the boldly going.
- San Francisco International Film Festival continues
- Published: Apr 29, 2009
It's probably natural for the consequence of deep film-fest immersion to be a voice in my head saying, "Wait. Slow down. Let me process."
- San Franciso International Film Festival adventure starts tonight
- Published: Apr 23, 2009
Hey, wow, this is my first time being fully credentialed for a major film festival, with the lanyard and everything. I am cautiously optimistic.
- What I learned in San Francisco: The Movie
- Published: Apr 19, 2009
The evening amounted to a fun few hours with SF Film Society's Creative Director Miguel Pendás, about a dozen film buffs, and Chaplin, DeMille, Stroheim, Welles, Hitchcock and the gang.
- Sin Nombre's director CJ Fukunaga
- Published: Apr 03, 2009
It sure is swell to meet a precocious young American filmmaker who's not just a navel-gazer, who's actually traveled all over the world, gotten out of his own head, and come back with something to say.
- Crossroads: The Films of Bruce Conner
- Published: Mar 18, 2009
Bruce Conner is in your head. How did he get there? Do not be alarmed, but there has been some seepage in the collective consciousness.
- Observer Observed: Film/Video Works by Takahiko Iimura
- Published: Mar 14, 2009
For now, never mind trying to comprehend the enormous, diverse, ambitious and satisfying whole of the 27th annual San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. It's too much. The mind reels. Focus instead, if only for just this brief moment, on Japanese experimental multimedia artist Takahiko Iimura.
- Medicine for Melancholy
- Published: Mar 06, 2009
San Francisco is a character in Medicine for Melancholy, but not in a way it has been in movies before. It's still a place of easy and obvious charm, of beauty and romance, but not an easy place for the black 7 percent of its population to live.
- Mostly British Film Series
- Published: Feb 26, 2009
If this year's Academy Awards taught us anything, it's that Americans will always appreciate creative moviemaking professionals who speak English but are not American.
- Crips and Bloods: Made in America
- Published: Feb 20, 2009
Just a few miles from Rodeo Drive a perpetually smoldering civil war has been going on for decades and already has claimed some 15,000 American lives.
- Director Henry Selick on Coraline and Coming Home Again
- Published: Feb 06, 2009
Filmmaker Henry Selick talked to KQED about his new film, Coraline, his Bay Area moviemaking roots, the time-intensive art of animated adaptation, and where he might like to go next.
- 575 Castro Street
- Published: Jan 29, 2009
575 Castro Street has only four shots. Its only action, per se, comes from spills of light and shadow kicked up by passing cars on the street outside.
- Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
- Published: Jan 23, 2009
Most of Scott Walker: 30 Century Man feels like having just been slipped an unknown LP from an earnestly intelligent fanboy friend who has locked the door and won't let you leave without listening.
- Berlin & Beyond
- Published: Jan 15, 2009
Sheesh, it's a good thing that everything we know about Germany doesn't only come from English-language films about it. Even now, whether it's the tastefully depressive (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas), the shamelessly award-grubbing (The Reader), the surprisingly stagnant (Valkyrie) or the grimly perfunctory (Defiance), the movies still seem stuck on Nazis.
- Bay Area Documentaries: Selections from the Academy's Shortlist
- Published: Jan 09, 2009
It has been said, often by Bay Area documentarians, that the Bay Area has more documentarians than any other American metropolis. How often it has been said, and by how many documentarians, is not known. Someone should document this.
- 10 last-minute, locally relevant DVD gift ideas
- Published: Dec 24, 2008
When giving the gift of DVD (or Blu-ray, if you're there yet), the easy rule of thumb is to always get something you'd want to watch with the person you're giving it to.
- Other Cinema: New Experimental Works
- Published: Dec 19, 2008
Other Cinema's quasi-annual New Experimental Works showcase packs so much bewitching, perplexing, WTF'ing, un-boring cinematic fringery into a single evening that it might even counteract a whole month's worth of over-serious multiplex Oscar bait.
- Pray the Devil Back to Hell
- Published: Dec 13, 2008
There's no polite way to say this, but you wouldn't think a documentary about Liberia could be uplifting.
- Quebec Film Week
- Published: Dec 11, 2008
First, consider the concepts: A near-future dystopia, in which some bureaucratic functionary's fantasy life begets corrosive social satire. A tale of late-'60s suburban dysfunction, as viewed through the prism of adolescence.
- Half a dozen dirty things people have said about Robert Aldrich
- Published: Nov 21, 2008
Judging by the thirty feature films he left us with (and certainly he has been judged by them), Hollywood director Robert Aldrich's enduring legacy will be the fact of having endured his legacy.
- Nerdcore Rising
- Published: Nov 18, 2008
Instead of conscious hip-hop, where the flow is ever-so-smooth and the vibe is soulful and socially aware, how about self-conscious hip-hop, where the flow is spastic, the vibe computer-savvy and socially awkward?
- Baby Peggy 90th Birthday Bash
- Published: Nov 07, 2008
Diana Serra Cary probably can't help with your complicated feelings about Lindsay Lohan and Dakota Fanning. But Cary, born Peggy-Jean Montgomery in 1918, certainly can offer some perspective on the peculiar, glamorous, exploitative, glorious, horrifying phenomenon of child stardom. She was one of its inventors.
- Fear(s) of the Dark
- Published: Oct 31, 2008
Like a good nightmare, which is to say a bad nightmare, the (mostly) black-and-white animation on offer from these six eminent graphic artists seems at once brusquely literal and obliquely expressionistic.
- Arab Film Festival
- Published: Oct 16, 2008
Some algebra surely will be required to figure out how to negotiate a festival packing 16 fiction features, 16 documentary features, 25 fiction shorts and 15 documentary shorts into 13 days and four cities (San Francisco, Berkeley, San Jose and Los Angeles), all while umpteen other don't-miss Bay Area film festivals seem to also be going on.
- French Cinema Now
- Published: Oct 07, 2008
For many years, America has made a sport of wondering why the French are so healthy. They smoke like fiends, which explains the low rates of obesity. They drink wine like it's going out of style, which explains the low rates of heart disease. But what accounts for that robust vitality?
- Cine Manifest
- Published: Sep 28, 2008
Hey kids, let's put on a Marxist film collective! That, more or less, was a founding principle of Cine Manifest, the seven-member strong (and sometimes less strong) assembly of San Francisco filmmakers working from 1972 through 1978 to make politically potent movies that regular people could tolerate.
- Dave Holland Sextet: Pass It On
- Published: Sep 23, 2008
Dave Holland shares everything: wisdom, solos, credit. It might be the secret to his success as a post-bop, avant-garde, fusion and post-fusion mainstay, or just the basic organizing principle of the 61-year-old bassist and bandleader's new album, Pass it On.
- Alternative Visions: Mock Up on Mu
- Published: Sep 02, 2008
The Pacific Film Archive's weekly Alternative Visions series blasts off and blows up on Tuesday, September 2 at 7:30 p.m., with a new feature from the tirelessly resourceful multimedia culture jammer and mad maven of San Francisco's Other Cinema, Craig Baldwin.
- Carson Mell: Dispatches from Dimension X
- Published: Aug 28, 2008
So far, Carson Mell is just that guy whose clever, weird, hilarious, rude, richly literary short animated films have been justification enough for your subscription to Wholphin, the McSweeney's DVD magazine.
- Hats Off
- Published: Aug 22, 2008
Quite reasonably identified as one of "the 50 most beautiful people in New York" three years ago, when she was 90, Mimi Weddell has enjoyed a distinguished (if not famous) career as an actor, a character and a muse.
- SF Shorts 2008
- Published: Aug 06, 2008
You might think of short films as, at best, mere trifles, or warm-ups to more sophisticated and complete-seeming films of feature length. You might think, movie-wise, that shorter means lamer.
