Pain and Glory (2019; Pedro Almodóvar) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes Opens on Friday, Nov. 8, at the Tower Theatre in Sacramento. For his 21st feature film, the great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar once again reaches into the inkwell of semi-autobiography. In the quietly enchanting Pain and Glory, […]
Downtown ’81 (2000; Edo Bertoglio) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes Opens on Friday, Nov. 1, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. You can’t slice this thing open without rattling off the rich backstory, so here we go. Swiss director Edo Bertoglio shot Downtown ’81 in the early […]
By Daniel Barnes MVFF42 is in the books. The 42nd annual Mill Valley Film Festival featured the usual mix of awards contenders, pseudo-indies and super-indies. New films from Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodovar and Noah Baumbach made their Northern California debuts. Meanwhile, stars like Kristen Stewart and Olivia Wilde […]
Monos (2019; Alejandro Landres) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, October 4, at the Tower Theatre in Sacramento. Brazilian director Landres delivers a powerful experience with this story of child soldiers losing their minds and souls. Monos is equally raw and phantasmagoric, beautiful and ugly. Landres uses every […]
Chulas Fronteras (1976; Les Blank) GRADE: B+ Del Mero Corazón (1979; Maureen Gosling) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes Les Blank made a lot of music documentaries, but he was also one of the cinema’s great ethnographers. His delightful 1976 film Chulas Fronteras (Beautiful Borders) ostensibly covers culture-blending Tejano musicians along the […]
Official Secrets (2019; Gavin Hood) GRADE: C- By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, September 13, at the Tower Theatre in Sacramento and the Varsity Theater in Davis. Keira Knightley stars as British whistleblower Katharine Gun in this shallow and painfully derivative biopic. The real Gun is a blonde, but those […]
