Non-Fiction (2019; Olivier Assayas) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, May 31, at the Tower Theatre in Sacramento. Now playing in San Francisco, Berkeley and San Rafael. “A Cloud of Mid-Life Crises” Ever the lagger, Non-Fiction puts me seven films deep into the oeuvre of French filmmaker Olivier Assayas. In […]
Let the Sunshine In (2018; Claire Denis) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, May 4, at the Landmark Clay in San Francisco and the Landmark Shattuck in Berkeley. Claire Denis makes her first feature film since 2013’s Bastards with this beguiling romantic dramedy about a middle-aged artist who longs to […]
Cold Water (1994; Olivier Assayas) GRADE: B+ By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, May 4, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Unreleased and unavailable for decades, writer-director Olivier Assayas‘ harsh coming-of-age story Cold Water gets the 4K treatment. It arrives just in time to feed my growing obsession with the filmmaker. […]
Ismael’s Ghosts (2018; Arnaud Desplechin) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, April 20, at the Landmark Opera Plaza in San Francisco and the Lark Theater in Larkspur. When I reviewed Arnaud Desplechin’s lovely My Golden Days in April 2016, I made the somewhat embarrassing admission that it was […]
The Girl Without Hands (2017; Sébastien Laudenbach) GRADE: C+ By Daniel Barnes *Opens Friday, September 15, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. In this woozy adaptation of the Grimm Brothers fairy tale, a young girl is sold to the devil by her poor father in exchange for a […]
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 […]
