By Daniel Barnes and Mike Dub DANIEL: As I’ve stated many times, the real purpose of these festivals is to fill in some of my more glaring cinematic blind spots. In my festival intro, I mentioned that “I came a little bit late to the Dardenne brothers party,” […]
Magic Mike XXL (2015; Gregory Jacobs) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes Steven Soderbergh’s male stripper drama Magic Mike became a left-field hit in 2012, grossing over $100 million at the domestic box office against a budget of $7 million. Magic Mike cemented the star power of Channing Tatum, […]
The Son (2002; Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes In my festival intro, I mentioned that actor Jérémie Renier served as the Dardenne brothers’ “on-again, off-again muse,” a blonde-mopped personification of moral turpitude and financial desperation in modern-day Belgium. That argument still holds water, especially […]
Rosetta (1999; Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne) GRADE: A By Daniel Barnes There persists an idea that the Dardenne brothers create aimlessly verisimilar films, but now that I’m five movies deep into their filmography (deep enough to create my first Dardenne Brothers Power Rankings), it’s clear that they shrewdly […]
Rebels of the Neon God (1992: Tsai Ming-liang) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes Festival circuit cinephiles revere Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang for films like Goodbye Dragon Inn, What Time is It There?, last year’s Stray Dogs, and Journey to the West (the slow-walking monk one, not the kung […]
The Wolfpack (2015; Crystal Moselle) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes *Opens today at the Embarcadero Center Cinema in San Francisco, the Landmark Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley, and the Regency in San Rafael. Many hardcore cinephiles are socially maladroit misfits, and many more behave as though they learned how […]
