City Hall (2020; Frederick Wiseman) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Now playing at the Roxie Virtual Cinema. Nonagenarian documentarian Frederick Wiseman (Ex Libris and Monrovia, Indiana ) applies his usual measured and methodical approach to this look at Boston’s city government. No one chronicles American institutions with Wiseman’s fly-on-the-wall thoroughness, […]
Downtown ’81 (2000; Edo Bertoglio) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes Opens on Friday, Nov. 1, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. You can’t slice this thing open without rattling off the rich backstory, so here we go. Swiss director Edo Bertoglio shot Downtown ’81 in the early […]
Chulas Fronteras (1976; Les Blank) GRADE: B+ Del Mero Corazón (1979; Maureen Gosling) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes Les Blank made a lot of music documentaries, but he was also one of the cinema’s great ethnographers. His delightful 1976 film Chulas Fronteras (Beautiful Borders) ostensibly covers culture-blending Tejano musicians along the […]
Walking on Water (2019; Andrey Paounov) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, May 24, at the Landmark Opera Plaza in San Francisco and the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley. “Industrial-Scale Whimsy” I started this blog over five years ago, and in that time, I penned and published over […]
Mountain (2018; Jennifer Peedom) GRADE: C By Daniel Barnes *Opens June 1, 2018, at the Landmark Opera Plaza in San Francisco and the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley. “Florid and Cranky” “Our need for mountains runs deep and wide,” breathes Willem Dafoe in his unmistakable sultry growl. “Mountains are wild […]
Rat Film (2017; Theo Anthony) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, October 27, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Director Anthony makes his feature debut with this unconventional documentary about the persistent rat problem in Baltimore, as well as the connections between the thriving vermin and the […]
