Co-host of the Dare Daniel and Canon Fodder podcasts and a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle.
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 […]
Three on a Match (1932; Mervyn LeRoy) GRADE: B Safe in Hell (1931; William Wellman) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes Safe in Hell is one of the five films that William Wellman directed in 1931, along with The Public Enemy. Three on a Match is one of the […]
The Club (2016; Pablo Larraín) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes The Club is the followup film to director/co-writer Pablo Larraín’s Oscar-nominated No, and it’s another intimate and methodical take on a dark era in Chilean history. In this case, the film concerns the systematic cover-up of child sexual […]
