Co-host of the Dare Daniel and Canon Fodder podcasts and a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle.
Strange Days (1995; Kathryn Bigelow) GRADE: C By Daniel Barnes One of the fascinating and unfortunate things about director Kathryn Bigelow is her natural and often exploitative appropriation of the male gaze. As I wrote in this 2010 SN&R column on Bigelow, “Her great cinematic obsession is the […]
Pandora’s Box (1929; G.W. Pabst) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes Some people have argued that the black bob haircut popularly associated with Louise Brooks was first sported onscreen by actress Colleen Moore. This may be true, even if pre-fame photos of Brooks show her with an evolving version […]
The Holy Mountain (1973; Alejandro Jodorowsky) GRADE: A- By Daniel Barnes Where do you even begin to penetrate something as insane, and insanely inventive, as Jodorowsky’s psychedelic religious parable? Here is the plot synopsis offered by IMDB: “This film gives the omniscient view of what social engineering caused by […]
A Fool There Was (1915; Frank Powell) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes As I stated in my festival intro, while Theda Bara may have created a cinematic archetype and inspired an evolution in movie publicity machines with A Fool There Was, her “vamp” character did not break any […]
Bad Timing (1980; Nicolas Roeg) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes There is nothing easily definable about Nicolas Roeg’s perverse romance Bad Timing, right down to that mysterious title. Bad Timing is a film about lies, distortions, and manipulation, not anything as fickle and uncalculated as “bad timing.” The […]
The Most Dangerous Game (1932; Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes Based on a widely adapted 1924 short story by Richard Connell, the 1932 chiller The Most Dangerous Game is the film that producers Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper made right […]
