In recent years, I spent the first two weeks of October covering the Mill Valley Film Festival . The festival celebrated its 40th anniversary this year, honoring the gamut of independent film, from star-heavy productions with awards in their sights (Sean Penn, Greta Gerwig and Andrew Garfield were […]
Whose Streets? (2017; Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, August 11, at the Landmark Embarcadero in San Francisco and the Landmark California in Berkeley. A portrait of activism captured by activists, mostly focusing on street-level views of the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri. […]
Person to Person (2017; Dustin Guy Defa) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes A scruffy little charmer from festival darling Defa, in the form of a smart indie ensemble piece about – what else? – mixed-up New Yorkers stumbling towards some sort of personal connection. Defa made his bones with […]
Nowhere to Hide (2017; Zaradasht Ahmed) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, June 30, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Politically charged, video vérité war documentaries have been appearing so frequently (and so similarly) in recent years that it becomes too easy for formalist aesthetes to callously […]
Staying Vertical (2017; Alain Guiraudie) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes Alain Guiraudie’s self-contained, cryptic, borderline pornographic, Hitchcock-goes-homoerotic Stranger by the Lake was a jaw-dropping breakthrough in 2013/2014, even though it was the sixth feature film for the 52-year-old French writer-director. Staying Vertical is his highly anticipated follow-up, a […]
By Daniel Barnes When you add up my weekly reviews in the Sacramento News & Review, my work here at E Street Film Society, and my contributions to other print and online publications, I penned nearly 200 published movie reviews in 2016. Whatever the results, I worked hard […]
