Sound of Metal (2020; Darius Marder) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes *Now playing in select theaters and on Amazon Prime. Riz Ahmed delivers a solid performance as Ruben, a heavy metal drummer dealing with hearing loss in this otherwise pedestrian therapy drama. “Punk Rock Domesticity” As the film […]
City Hall (2020; Frederick Wiseman) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Now playing at the Roxie Virtual Cinema. Nonagenarian documentarian Frederick Wiseman (Ex Libris and Monrovia, Indiana ) applies his usual measured and methodical approach to this look at Boston’s city government. No one chronicles American institutions with Wiseman’s fly-on-the-wall thoroughness, […]
Sorry We Missed You (2020; Ken Loach) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opening Friday, March 13, at the Landmark Opera Plaza in San Francisco. Ken Loach follows his Palme d’Or winner I, Daniel Blake with another agreeable yet biting look at dehumanized working-class Brits. You were expecting maybe […]
Greed (2020; Michael Winterbottom) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes *Opening Friday, March 6, at the Tower Theatre in Sacramento, as well as the Regal Natomas and Regal UA Laguna Village. The Adam McKay-ification of the global cinema-scape continues apace with this toothless, pseudo-intellectual satire. Director Michael Winterbottom once […]
Color Out of Space (2020; Richard Stanley) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes *Now playing in San Francisco and Berkeley. Something evil lurks in the forest in Color Out of Space, a mixed-bag adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft short story. Psychedelic horror meets lo-fi Spielberg-ian family fantasy in the […]
By Daniel Barnes After many years of writing about movies for online and print publications, 2019 challenged me to remain a film critic. The Sacramento News & Review dropped movie reviews from the paper in early January. Even if the SN&R kept me around, the freelance limits of […]
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