Double Lover (2018; François Ozon) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes Hard-working genre chameleon François Ozon follows up his bland, black-and-white historical drama Frantz with this juicy erotic thriller. Double Lover concerns a slightly unstable woman whose relationship with her ex-analyst grows even more complicated when she starts sleeping with his sadistic […]
Shadows in Mind (2018; Mark Schwab) GRADE: C- By Daniel Barnes “Descent Into the Dark Web” One of the most underrated documentaries of the last decade, David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s Tickled transformed a tabloid-ready story about power and pornography into an engrossing examination of obscene privilege run amok. […]
ANIMATED SHORT NOMINEES (from best to worst) Garden Party (Florian Babikian, Vincent Bayoux, Victor Caire, Théophile Dufresne, Gabriel Grapperon and Lucas Navarro; France) LOU (Dave Mullins; USA) While the animated short field looks relatively strong this year, these are the two class acts of the category. LOU is the requisite Pixar entry (it […]
Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2018; Hiromasa Yonebayashi) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, January 19, and at the Palladio 16 Cinemas in Folsom and the AMC Van Ness in San Francisco. Studio Ghibli veteran Hiromasa Yonebayashi adapts Mary Stewart’s 1971 children’s novel The Little Broomstick into this charming, […]
Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (2017; Pedro Rivero and Alberto Vázquez) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, January 12, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. This dark, bleak, Spanish-language animated fable premiered in 2015. However, it only now makes an American debut thanks to GKIDS, an essential distribution […]
The Sacrifice (1986; Andrei Tarkovsky) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes *Opens Thursday, January 11, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco and at the PFA in Berkeley. Full disclosure: although the perfectly washed-out colors of Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice have been given a faithful 4K restoration, my viewing experience was […]
