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 […]
Welcome to Leith (2015; Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes Welcome to Leith looks at the panic that overtook the citizens of a tiny North Dakota farming community when white supremacists sought to take over their town. A barren city of a […]
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2015; Roy Andersson) GRADE: A By Daniel Barnes “I’m happy to hear you’re doing fine.” A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is the best film of the year so far, and it’s not that close. It […]
Fort Tilden (2015; Sarah Violet-Bliss and Charles Rogers) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes *Opens tomorrow, August 14, at the AMC Metreon 16 in San Francisco. Fort Tilden also premieres tomorrow on VOD services. “We fucked up summer.” The existential crises of the young, privileged, bored, white, female, and […]
Best of Enemies (2015; Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes I generally recoil when I hear the word “important” in a documentary. Besides being an utterly meaningless evaluation, it’s a red flag of self-inflation. If you need to bring on a stacked deck of […]
The Look of Silence (2015; Joshua Oppenheimer) GRADE: A- By Daniel Barnes In the Fall of 1965, the military-led, American-supported government of Indonesia oversaw the genocide of nearly one million people under the guise of eradicating Communism, and the people who ordered and carried out the butchery became […]
