Co-host of the Dare Daniel and Canon Fodder podcasts and a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle.
Sunday morning in San Rafael started with Weaver’s Coffee, Theresa-and-Joe’s Comfort Food, a frantic last-minute switch out of Eric Decker from my fantasy lineup, and my first screening at the Christopher B. Smith Film Center. Pascal Plisson’s documentary On the Way to School follows four groups of children […]
The temperature today at the Mill Valley Film Festival reached 90 degrees, and the locals that I talked to could not recall a hotter Autumn in the festival’s history. When you consider that the nicest suit most locals wear outside is a bicycle jersey, it could have been […]
I was not able to make it to the first night of the 37th annual Mill Valley Film Festival, which opened with the Tommy Lee Jones-directed western The Homesman, introduced live by star Hilary Swank. Although I had already screened about a half dozen films that will […]
The Zero Theorem (2014; Terry Gilliam) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes In the opening shots of Terry Gilliam’s cheeky sci-fi dystopia The Zero Theorem, a bald, naked, future man studies the churning menace of a black hole on a large computer screen in an abandoned church. All the […]
Dodes-ka’Den (1970; Dir.: Akira Kurosawa) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes Made in 1970 during a period of intense personal and professional turmoil, the ramshackle Dodes’ka-Den is a strange anomaly in the Kurosawa filmography. It was his long-awaited return to filmmaking after a string of high-profile projects withered on […]
Law Abiding Citizen (2009; F. Gary Gray) GRADE: D- By Daniel Barnes I graduated from college a little over a decade ago, but judging by a cursory Google News search, one of the most annoying and frustrating aspects of my campus experience continues to this day – the […]
