Co-host of the Dare Daniel and Canon Fodder podcasts and a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle.
In recent years, I spent the first two weeks of October covering the Mill Valley Film Festival . The festival celebrated its 40th anniversary this year, honoring the gamut of independent film, from star-heavy productions with awards in their sights (Sean Penn, Greta Gerwig and Andrew Garfield were […]
Ex Libris – The New York Public Library (2017; Frederick Wiseman) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, October 13, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Somewhere in the middle of this 44th feature-length Frederick Wiseman documentary, a typically sprawling and reflective look at the New York […]
Chavela (2017; Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, October 6, at the Landmark Opera Plaza in San Francisco and the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley. An affectionate but rudimentary documentary introduction to Chavela Vargas, a singer virtually unknown to western audiences, but a groundbreaking […]
Lucky (2017; John Carroll Lynch) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, October 6, at the Landmark Embarcadero in San Francisco and the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley. Harry Dean Stanton headlines this tailor-made swan song, playing a nonagenarian coming to terms with his impending death in an oddball-filled desert […]
The Lost City of Cecil B. Demille (2017; Peter Brosnan) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes An amateurish but compelling documentary passion project from Brosnan, a low-level screenwriter who spent several decades obsessing over a piece of Hollywood history buried in the California sands. When Cecil B. DeMille filmed his […]
The Unknown Girl (2017; Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes The Dardenne Brothers, those Belgian purveyors of austerity and despair, have always been a tough sell for mainstream audiences. Their films are so raw, so pure, so devoid of artifice and often so hopeless that […]
