Co-host of the Dare Daniel and Canon Fodder podcasts and a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle.
Keep the Change (2018; Rachel Israel) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes Writer-director Israel makes her feature debut with this largely delightful romantic comedy. Keep the Change is an expansion of Israel’s 2013 short film starring the same lead actors. Brandon Polansky plays David, an acerbic autistic man who […]
24 Frames (2018; Abbas Kiarostami) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami passed away in July 2016, but this experimental passion project, which apparently occupied the last several years of his life, premiered at Cannes the following year and now gets a brief Bay Area run. […]
Tehran Taboo (2018; Ali Soozandeh) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes Iranian-born German filmmaker Soozandeh makes his feature debut with this rotoscope-animated ensemble drama about young adults searching for some measure of freedom in their extremely restrictive society. The serpentine story slinks around some tenuously connected city dwellers: ex-addict Pari, […]
Double Lover (2018; François Ozon) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes Hard-working genre chameleon François Ozon follows up his bland, black-and-white historical drama Frantz with this juicy erotic thriller. Double Lover concerns a slightly unstable woman whose relationship with her ex-analyst grows even more complicated when she starts sleeping with his sadistic […]
Shadows in Mind (2018; Mark Schwab) GRADE: C- By Daniel Barnes “Descent Into the Dark Web” One of the most underrated documentaries of the last decade, David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s Tickled transformed a tabloid-ready story about power and pornography into an engrossing examination of obscene privilege run amok. […]
ANIMATED SHORT NOMINEES (from best to worst) Garden Party (Florian Babikian, Vincent Bayoux, Victor Caire, Théophile Dufresne, Gabriel Grapperon and Lucas Navarro; France) LOU (Dave Mullins; USA) While the animated short field looks relatively strong this year, these are the two class acts of the category. LOU is the requisite Pixar entry (it […]
