Whose Streets? (2017; Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, August 11, at the Landmark Embarcadero in San Francisco and the Landmark California in Berkeley. A portrait of activism captured by activists, mostly focusing on street-level views of the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri. […]
Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017; Bill Morrison) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, July 14, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. A stunning work of curation from documentary filmmaker Morrison, a story of fortune, folly, film and fire preserved in permafrost. When the Yukon Gold Rush […]
Nowhere to Hide (2017; Zaradasht Ahmed) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, June 30, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Politically charged, video vérité war documentaries have been appearing so frequently (and so similarly) in recent years that it becomes too easy for formalist aesthetes to callously […]
Miss Sharon Jones! (2016; Barbara Kopple) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes The 1960s soul revival band Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings built a worldwide reputation primarily on their electric live shows, gaining a devoted following without ever recording a hit song. At the center of the Dap-Kings sound […]
Meet Marlon Brando (1965; Albert and David Maysles) Grade: B By Mike Dub In the introduction to last year’s ESFS Festival about the “Dark Ages” of Marlon Brando, we discussed the unrelenting stream of box office bombs that afflicted Brando throughout the 1960s. Hamstrung under a difficult contract […]
