Once again this year, the Mill Valley Film Festival got off to a splashy, star-heavy start, with west coast premieres of Arrival and La La Land attended by their respective stars Amy Adams and Emma Stone. My noble colleagues in the San Francisco Film Critics Circle even hobnobbed […]
White Zombie (1932; Victor Halperin) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes From its first shot of a Haitian burial ceremony undulating under the opening credits, Victor Halperin’s 1932 indie horror film White Zombie establishes an eerie and unusual atmosphere. The corpse in question is getting buried in the middle […]
The First Legion (1951; Douglas Sirk) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes A real curiosity from Douglas Sirk, a black-and-white B-production about Jesuit priests “in one small corner of the modern world,” and an unexpectedly complex examination of faith and doubt. Restored last year by the UCLA Film & […]
Three on a Match (1932; Mervyn LeRoy) GRADE: B Safe in Hell (1931; William Wellman) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes Safe in Hell is one of the five films that William Wellman directed in 1931, along with The Public Enemy. Three on a Match is one of the […]
Mustang (2015; Deniz Gamze Ergüven) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes First-timer Deniz Gamze Ergüven directs this passionate drama about five feisty Turkish sisters who rebel against their strict seaside family, finding that their freedoms wane as their bodies mature. After getting let out of school for the summer, […]
By Daniel Barnes The 38th annual Mill Valley Film Festival wrapped up last night with a gala screening of Suffragette, starring an on-the-scene Carey Mulligan, as well as Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep. Suffragette is a legit awards season “contender,” so I’ll have ample opportunity to see […]
