Film critic for the Sacramento News and Review. Craft beer columnist for the Sacramento Bee. Member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle.
The Act of Killing (2013; Dir.: Joshua Oppenheimer, w/ Christine Cynn and Anonymous) GRADE: A By Daniel Barnes One of the great, unique, often intangible and sometimes scary potentials of the film medium is the way that cinematic artifice can achieve something more profound than mere fact. We […]
“ARRESTED ADOLESCENCE IN PRE-APATOW AMERICA” (the silent era – 1996) By Professor Daniel Barnes Every couple of months, Mike and I will be challenging each other to create a fake syllabus for a nonexistent university-level film course. It begins with one of us proposing a general course subject […]
THE BIG WEDDING (2013; Dir.: Justin Zackham) GRADE: F By Daniel Barnes It is important to note that I was dared to watch The Big Wedding by my father, Walter Barnes, Jr. Besides being a wonderful Dad, my father is a huge movie fan, and his early influence […]
Unlike the American-produced propaganda purveyed by Michael Bay, Peter Berg and Roland Emmerich, the Russian 3D IMAX epic Stalingrad smuggles a tender soul into the omnipresent CGI and Gladiator-style fight scenes. *You can’t spell “menigococcal” without McG. *Besides my film reviews, I also write about beer, as in […]
*Originally published on the Movie City USA blog on September 6, 2007. IL GRIDO (1957; Dir.: Michelangelo Antonioni) DUB’S TAKE: “In my collection I have a copy of Il Grido, and damn what a boring movie it is…. You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade. He concentrated […]
Scorsese talks about Antonioni, placing him within the context of the era’s European “arthouse” cinema. He also calls L’Eclisse the “boldest” of the three films, “less like a story and more like a poem.” Naturally, Scorsese makes me ashamed for not liking the movie more. The opening credits of the […]
