By Daniel Barnes All hail, Awards Season! Tyrant of all she surveys! Oppressor of cinephiles! Scourge of the pudgy and bespectacled! Obvious Ben Whishaw fan! Long may her tastefully bland mediocrities inexplicably occupy our otherwise intelligent thoughts! SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29 Victor Frankenstein (Dir.: Paul McGuigan; GRADE: C+) Not […]
BEST ACTOR Christopher Abbott, James White Samuel L. Jackson, The Hateful Eight Tom Courtenay, 45 Years Tom Hardy, Mad Max: Fury Road Jesse Eisenberg, The End of the Tour BEST ACTRESS Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years Greta Gerwig, Mistress America Juliette Binoche, Clouds of Sils Maria Cate Blanchett, Carol […]
By Daniel Barnes More coffee-fueled palaver about meaningless awards and reductive categorizations? No problemo! WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25 Love & Mercy ***REWATCH*** (Dir.: Bill Pohlad; GRADE: B+) The only real change from my initial assessment of this Brian Wilson biopic is that I severely underrated Paul Giamatti’s performance, probably […]
w By Daniel Barnes I’m dedicating the month leading up to the SF Film Critics Circle awards on 12/13 to my End-of-Year Cramfest. It’s my personal War on Xmas – I’ll be screening the awards contenders, catching up on overlooked movies, and rewatching some of my favorites from […]
By Daniel Barnes It’s that time of year again. Awards season, baby! Let the naysayers focus on the dark side of the process: the wastefulness of awards campaigns, the annual sanctification of the middlebrow and the bland, the shameless glad-handing, the bloated self-importance of mediocre critics, the insipid […]
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, […]
