My Golden Days (2016; Arnaud Desplechin) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes My somewhat embarrassing admission: My Golden Days is my first Desplechin film, so I’m no position to judge whether it’s a good, bad or mediocre version of the French auteur’s work. I just know that I loved […]
Marguerite (2016; Xavier Giannoli) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opens tomorrow at the Embarcadero Center Cinemas in San Francisco, the Albany Twin in Berkeley, the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, the Camera 3 in San Jose and the Aquarius in Palo Alto. A major award winner […]
Mountains May Depart (2016; Jia Zhangke) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes An alternately rapturous and ponderous story of Chinese tradition resisting the eraser of progress, Mountains May Depart stars Zhangke muse (and wife) Tao Zhao as Tao, a small-town girl whose flirtation with a “true capitalist” and rejection […]
The Club (2016; Pablo Larraín) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes The Club is the followup film to director/co-writer Pablo Larraín’s Oscar-nominated No, and it’s another intimate and methodical take on a dark era in Chilean history. In this case, the film concerns the systematic cover-up of child sexual […]
Rams (2016; Grímur Hákonarson) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes A prime Best Foreign Language Film Oscar snub now getting dumped pre-Oscars into an Opera Plaza bandbox, Rams is still smarter and more surprising than most of the actual nominees in that category. In an isolated valley in Iceland, sheep […]
The Treasure (2015; Corneliu Porumboui) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes Another deadpan, three-headed Romanian history lesson from the director of 12:08 East of Bucharest, this time in the form of a treasure hunt. Struggling family man Costi (Toma Cuzin, who also figures prominently into the superior Aferim!, this […]
