Co-host of the Dare Daniel and Canon Fodder podcasts and a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle.
By Daniel Barnes It’s that time of year again. Awards season, baby! Let the naysayers focus on the dark side of the process: the wastefulness of awards campaigns, the annual sanctification of the middlebrow and the bland, the shameless glad-handing, the bloated self-importance of mediocre critics, the insipid […]
Mustang (2015; Deniz Gamze Ergüven) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes First-timer Deniz Gamze Ergüven directs this passionate drama about five feisty Turkish sisters who rebel against their strict seaside family, finding that their freedoms wane as their bodies mature. After getting let out of school for the summer, […]
Tab Hunter Confidential (2015; Jeffrey Schwarz) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes A 1950s heartthrob sold to the public as “six feet of rugged manhood” and chaste, Dobie Gillis-like heterosexuality, Tab Hunter remained “very closeted” away from the cameras. Now 84 years old and still the embodiment of sun-kissed […]
Welcome to Leith (2015; Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes Welcome to Leith looks at the panic that overtook the citizens of a tiny North Dakota farming community when white supremacists sought to take over their town. A barren city of a […]
17th Annual Animation Show of Shows By Daniel Barnes I’ll take any opportunity to urge people towards the seventeen life-changing minutes of Don Herzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow, so here we go again. I wrote this about World of Tomorrow in my 2015 mid-year review: “It’s a beautiful and […]
Experimenter (2015; Michael Almereyda) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes *Opening tomorrow at the Landmark Opera Plaza in San Francisco, the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley and the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. Now available to rent on VOD. Peter Sarsgaard stars in this intriguing but […]
