Monday saw me back in Sacramento, taking an off day from live screenings and spending some quality time with the wife and pets. However, I did manage to polish off a couple of screeners for films that played at Mill Valley this year, and my plan is to […]
Sunday morning in San Rafael started with Weaver’s Coffee, Theresa-and-Joe’s Comfort Food, a frantic last-minute switch out of Eric Decker from my fantasy lineup, and my first screening at the Christopher B. Smith Film Center. Pascal Plisson’s documentary On the Way to School follows four groups of children […]
The temperature today at the Mill Valley Film Festival reached 90 degrees, and the locals that I talked to could not recall a hotter Autumn in the festival’s history. When you consider that the nicest suit most locals wear outside is a bicycle jersey, it could have been […]
I was not able to make it to the first night of the 37th annual Mill Valley Film Festival, which opened with the Tommy Lee Jones-directed western The Homesman, introduced live by star Hilary Swank. Although I had already screened about a half dozen films that will […]
Kagemusha (1980; Akira Kurosawa) GRADE: A- By Mike Dub It might be hard to think that, at the age of seventy and already recognized around the world as a master of modern cinema, Akira Kurosawa would be capable of surprising us with a film that is as grand […]
Dersu Uzala (1975; Akira Kurosawa) GRADE: B- By Mike Dub Kurosawa has always been considered by critics to exhibit the most “western” style of filmmaking of all the Japanese greats. So it shouldn’t come as too big a surprise that Dersu Uzala at times feels more like one […]
