Once again this year, I am devoting the entire week of Thanksgiving to catching up with the 2016 films that I missed, as well as re-watching some of my favorites of the year so far. We begin this annual cinematic orgy with an invocation to our deity: All […]
The Handmaiden (2016; Chan-wook Park) GRADE: A- By Daniel Barnes The best film of the year so far. Anyone who has followed me over the years knows my love-hate relationship with the act of taking notes during a film. My chief concern: it interferes with the act of […]
Being 17 (2016; André Téchiné) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, October 27, at the Landmark Opera Plaza in San Francisco and the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley. Pampered, white, tentatively out teen Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein, who also starred in the MVFF39 offering Keeper) gets driven to […]
A rainy weekend in Northern California put a damper on my MVFF39 weekend plans, so we’ll keep this final installment short and sweet. Simon Killer director Antonio Campos’ Christine (GRADE: B) tells the tragic story of Florida anchorwoman Christine Chubbuck (Rebecca Hall, in a perfectly mannered performance), who […]
Hard-working director Pablo Larraín, who showed The Club at last year’s Mill Valley Film Festival, traveled to the Bay Area again this year to debut two new movies. There is tomorrow’s closing night selection Jackie, an English-language biopic about Jackie Kennedy set in the immediate aftermath of the […]
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 […]
