Co-host of the Dare Daniel and Canon Fodder podcasts and a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle.
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974; Martin Scorsese) GRADE: A- By Daniel Barnes In the recent Australian chiller The Babadook, Essie Davis plays a widowed mother who feels trapped by parenthood. She eventually becomes a greater threat to her screeching son than the titular monster. I thought about […]
Timbuktu (2014; Abderrahmane Sissako) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes This Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee from Mauritanian director Sissako (Bamako) looks at life in an African city forcibly placed under the rule of a new but brutal jihadist regime. Before your eyes glaze over and you start dreaming […]
The Duke of Burgundy (2015; Peter Strickland) GRADE: A- By Daniel Barnes “Luxurious and Layered” This luxurious and layered psycho-sexual drama is director Peter Strickland’s follow-up to his hypnotically stylish 2012 mind-fuck Berberian Sound Studio, which followed the breakdown of a mousy sound engineer working on a gory […]
Simon Sez (1999; Kevin Elders) GRADE: F By Daniel Barnes If you have ever attended an NBA game, then you have probably seen some of the pre-taped bits starring the home team’s players that get shown throughout the game on the arena Jumbotron. Players exhort the crowd to […]
Between my regular reviews in the Sacramento News & Review, my work here on E Street Film Society, and my occasional contributions to other publications and websites, I penned roughly 300 film-related reviews and articles in the calendar year 2014. It was a busy year, but also a […]
Listen Up Philip (2014; Alex Ross Perry) GRADE: A- By Daniel Barnes With the neophyte novelist Philip Lewis Friedman, a self-loathing narcissist driven to new levels of boorish behavior by his extremely minor notability, writer-director Alex Ross Perry created a neurotic asshole for the ages. He makes Ben […]
