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 […]
By Daniel Barnes In addition to all of my other freelance writing work, I penned roughly 200 movie reviews in the calendar year 2017. Whatever you think of the results, I worked on hard on that shit (I did!), so before all this work gets swept into the […]
Antiporno (2017; Sion Sono) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes More electrifying excess from Sono (Tokyo Tribe), this time a collaboration with Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest major film studio. Antiporno is part of a series of feature-length throwbacks to Nikkatsu’s 1970s “Roman Porno” output. In these films, directors received total artistic freedom, […]
