Co-host of the Dare Daniel and Canon Fodder podcasts and a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle.
Louder Than Bombs (2016; Joachim Trier) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes Denmark-born, Norway-based filmmaker Joachim Trier scored a critical hit in 2012 with the dark-night-of-the-soul drama Oslo August 31st. That somewhat overpraised film followed a recovering junkie descending back into addiction over a long night. The more appropriately […]
Fireworks Wednesday (2006; Asghar Farhadi) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes After the overwhelming acclaim of A Separation and a mini-crossover with The Past, the early films of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi have started trickling into American arthouses. His excellent 2009 film About Elly toured stateside arthouse theaters last […]
April and the Extraordinary World (2016; Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes Pure enjoyment, but then I’ve always been in the bag for humanist sci-fi, lizards wearing robot armor, unusual and meticulous production design, and adventure stories where one of the heroes is a […]
My Golden Days (2016; Arnaud Desplechin) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes My somewhat embarrassing admission: My Golden Days is my first Desplechin film, so I’m no position to judge whether it’s a good, bad or mediocre version of the French auteur’s work. I just know that I loved […]
Marguerite (2016; Xavier Giannoli) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opens tomorrow at the Embarcadero Center Cinemas in San Francisco, the Albany Twin in Berkeley, the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, the Camera 3 in San Jose and the Aquarius in Palo Alto. A major award winner […]
Mountains May Depart (2016; Jia Zhangke) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes An alternately rapturous and ponderous story of Chinese tradition resisting the eraser of progress, Mountains May Depart stars Zhangke muse (and wife) Tao Zhao as Tao, a small-town girl whose flirtation with a “true capitalist” and rejection […]
