Monos (2019; Alejandro Landres) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, October 4, at the Tower Theatre in Sacramento. Brazilian director Landres delivers a powerful experience with this story of child soldiers losing their minds and souls. Monos is equally raw and phantasmagoric, beautiful and ugly. Landres uses every […]
Neon Bull (2016; Gabriel Mascaro) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes A documentary filmmaker making only his second narrative feature, writer-director Mascaro invests the entrancing and upsetting Neon Bull with equal parts lived-in authenticity and dreamlike beauty. Neon Bull follows a surrogate family of cowhands and entertainers at the […]
Assault on the Pay Train (1962; Roberto Farias) Grade: B+ By Mike Dub Almost every heist movie ever made invests half its time depicting the expertise and professionalism involved in the detailed planning of the caper, then leads to an ostensibly heart-pounding climax in which the crime is […]
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 […]
