Fireworks Wednesday (2006; Asghar Farhadi) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes After the overwhelming acclaim of A Separation and a mini-crossover with The Past, the early films of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi have started trickling into American arthouses. His excellent 2009 film About Elly toured stateside arthouse theaters last […]
Marguerite (2016; Xavier Giannoli) GRADE: B By Daniel Barnes *Opens tomorrow at the Embarcadero Center Cinemas in San Francisco, the Albany Twin in Berkeley, the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, the Camera 3 in San Jose and the Aquarius in Palo Alto. A major award winner […]
Meet Marlon Brando (1965; Albert and David Maysles) Grade: B By Mike Dub In the introduction to last year’s ESFS Festival about the “Dark Ages” of Marlon Brando, we discussed the unrelenting stream of box office bombs that afflicted Brando throughout the 1960s. Hamstrung under a difficult contract […]
Shock Corridor (1963; Samuel Fuller) GRADE: A By Daniel Barnes In his 1963 film Pierrot le Fou, Jean-Luc Godard cast B-movie deity Sam Fuller as a Fuller-esque partygoer who declares, “Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, death…In one word, EMOTION.” It’s ostensibly a Godard line, but […]
Love in the Afternoon (1972; Eric Rohmer) GRADE: B+ By Mike Dub In each of his Six Moral Tales, Eric Rohmer presents a character at a different stage in his life, in various evolving stages of a relationship. Though basically unrelated, his films follow the evolution of a single love life […]
Suzanne’s Career (1963; Eric Rohmer) GRADE: B- By Daniel Barnes Shot on a shoestring and never released theatrically, the 60-minute featurette Suzanne’s Career is a technically abysmal early effort. Most professional filmmakers would look to bury it, as Quentin Tarantino did with My Best Friend’s Birthday. The film […]
