Welcome to Leith (2015; Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes Welcome to Leith looks at the panic that overtook the citizens of a tiny North Dakota farming community when white supremacists sought to take over their town. A barren city of a […]
17th Annual Animation Show of Shows By Daniel Barnes I’ll take any opportunity to urge people towards the seventeen life-changing minutes of Don Herzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow, so here we go again. I wrote this about World of Tomorrow in my 2015 mid-year review: “It’s a beautiful and […]
Experimenter (2015; Michael Almereyda) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes *Opening tomorrow at the Landmark Opera Plaza in San Francisco, the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley and the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. Now available to rent on VOD. Peter Sarsgaard stars in this intriguing but […]
Partisan (2015; Ariel Kleiman) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes I’ve come to realize that I am abnormally fascinated by movies about cults, whether in the form of documentary (Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple), dramatic non-fiction (Patty Hearst), fiction loosely inspired by fact (The Sacrament), or […]
Finders Keepers (2015; Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes If there were an award for Best Documentary That You Least Expected to Be an Emotionally Involving, Lump-in-Your-Throat Examination of Grief, Ambition, Class Resentment, Imperious Fathers, Media Exploitation and Human Frailty, then this tabloid-ready […]
The Keeping Room (2015; Daniel Barber) GRADE: C- By Daniel Barnes Set in “The American South, 1865”, Daniel Barber’s pompous and lifeless The Keeping Room opens with a quote from the Civil War’s rampaging General Sherman: “War is cruelty.” Under Barber’s heavy-handed direction, it’s also tedious and inert, […]
