Birds of Passage (2019; Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, March 1, at the Opera Plaza 4 in San Francisco. Embrace of the Serpent director Guerra and first-timer Gallego deliver this strangely static but wholly unexpected and unusual gangster saga, purportedly “inspired by […]
Holiday (2019; Isabella Eklöf) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, February 15, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. One of the screenwriters of the Oscar-nominated Border, Isabella Eklöf makes a stunning and disturbing directorial debut with Holiday, a sun-kissed travelogue of sexual violence on the Turkish Riviera. Victoria Carmen […]
Shoplifters (2018; Hirokazu Koreeda) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes When the domestic drama Shoplifters won the Palme d’Or last Summer at Cannes, right on the heels of a string of solid but same-ish domestic dramas from Japanese filmmaker Koreeda (including Like Father, Like Son, Our Little Sister and After the Storm), it seemed possible […]
Monrovia, Indiana (2018; Frederick Wiseman) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, November 9, at the Landmark Opera Plaza in San Francisco and the Rialto Elmwood in Berkeley. Living legend Frederick Wiseman (In Jackson Heights; Ex Libris) brings his democratic approach to documentaries to the heart of Trump America in Monrovia, […]
By Daniel Barnes The 41st annual Mill Valley Film Festival kicked off last night with the California debuts of two awards-groveling biopics: Peter Farrelly’s TIFF Audience Award winner Green Book and Matthew Heineman’s A Private War. Over the next week-and-a-half, celebrities such as Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton and Maggie Gyllenhaal will breeze […]
The Song of Sway Lake (2018; Ari Gold) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, September 21, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Rory Culkin stars in this impressionistic but inconsistent drama as Ollie Sway, a disaffected disc jockey who returns to his family home on Sway […]
