Co-host of the Dare Daniel and Canon Fodder podcasts and a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle.
Capricious Summer (1968; Jiri Menzel) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes For some reason, I watched Capricious Summer thinking it was the predecessor to writer-director-actor Jiri Menzel’s more polished Closely Watched Trains. Instead, this bawdy and cluttered but raggedly beautiful comedy was Menzel’s follow-up to Closely Watched Trains, which […]
La Collectionneuse (1967; Eric Rohmer) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes Two-thirds of the way through Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales series, I feel that I know exactly what to expect from the French filmmaker, and yet still remain utterly mystified. In writing about his movies, I often feel like […]
Suzanne’s Career (1963; Eric Rohmer) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes Shot on a shoestring and never released theatrically, the 60-minute featurette Suzanne’s Career is a technically abysmal early effort. Most professional filmmakers would look to bury it, as Quentin Tarantino did with My Best Friend’s Birthday. The film […]
Let the Fire Burn (2013; Jason Osder) GRADE: A- By Daniel Barnes Jason Osder’s powerful and disturbing Let the Fire Burn is part of a new wave of media collage documentaries that also includes Brett Morgen’s July 17, 1994 and Penny Lane’s Our Nixon. Rather than offer comforting […]
Jack and Jill (2011; Dennis Dugan) GRADE: D- By Daniel Barnes *Dared by Matt B. Over a decade ago in a college newspaper review of Little Nicky, I wrote, “Adam Sandler is truly his generation’s Jerry Lewis,” with everything great and terrible that statement implies.” It’s a fairly […]
By Daniel Barnes Fixed Bayonets! (1951; Sam Fuller) GRADE: B+ War movies are an indigenous territory for a director who liked to describe cinema as a battlefield. However, Fixed Bayonets! is a little more limited by its genre and commercial obligations. It’s about an outnumbered platoon given a […]
