All is True (2019; Kenneth Branagh) GRADE: C- By Daniel Barnes *Opens on Friday, June 14, at the Tower Theatre in Sacramento. “Flavorless Yet Vainglorious” Vintage shameless Branagh, borderline unwatchable, but also a weirdly perfect cap to a career built on flavorless yet vainglorious Shakespeare adaptations. It makes perfect […]
Non-Fiction (2019; Olivier Assayas) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, May 31, at the Tower Theatre in Sacramento. Now playing in San Francisco, Berkeley and San Rafael. “A Cloud of Mid-Life Crises” Ever the lagger, Non-Fiction puts me seven films deep into the oeuvre of French filmmaker Olivier Assayas. In […]
Walking on Water (2019; Andrey Paounov) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, May 24, at the Landmark Opera Plaza in San Francisco and the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley. “Industrial-Scale Whimsy” I started this blog over five years ago, and in that time, I penned and published over […]
Trial by Fire (2019; Edward Zwick) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, May 17, at the Tower Theatre in Sacramento. “Bold But Mercurial” Chunks of a pretty good prison movie occasionally bob to the surface of this bleeding-heart biopic about Cameron Todd Willingham. Unfortunately, they eventually drown […]
Pasolini (2019; Abel Ferrara) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, May 10, in New York City, and expands to other select theaters in the following weeks. “Obsessed with Banality” After playing Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate, Willem Dafoe continues his biopic tour of tragic artists with […]
Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2019; Bi Gan) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, May 3, at the Landmark Embarcadero in San Francisco and the Landmark California in Berkeley. “Tedious Wonderland” “A watch is a symbol of eternity. And it’s broken.” Dreams, memories and hallucinations get stacked […]
