Bayflicks.net

Cinequest continues and the Irish Film Festival plays its full run this week. See below for comments.
Around the Bay. Sparse and utilitarian, Alejandro Adams’ low-key drama gets right to the point, then tells its dysfunctional family story without pyrotechnics. Single dad Wyatt (Steve Voldseth) is so remote and [...]

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Family drama

Written by Nick Drake, from the memoir by Raimond Gaita
Directed by Richard Roxburgh

Nothing’s worse than a serious, character-driven drama that fails. A bad comedy will probably provide some laughs, and a bad action movie some thrills. But if a drama doesn’t work as a whole, the parts don’t amount to much, either.
Romulus, My [...]

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I just came back from the big Oscar shindig at the Rafael. I’m sorry to say I was disappointed.
I arrived early and entered the main, downstairs theater to plop my stuff down on a seat. That’s when I discovered that my general admission ticket gave me the right to sit in the last four rows, [...]

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[B] Comedy

Written and directed by Eran Kolirin

Kurt Vonnegut called unusual travel suggestions “dancing lessons from God.” A small Egyptian police orchestra does quite a rumba when they accidentally arrive in the wrong Israeli town in Kolirin’s gentle comedy.
There’s nothing political about this Arabs-meet-Jews movie. Neither politics nor religion ever come up. No one treats anyone [...]

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Family drama

Written and directed by Alejandro Adams

Sparse and utilitarian, Alejandro Adams’ low-key drama gets right to the point, then tells its dysfunctional family story without pyrotechnics. Single dad Wyatt (Steve Voldseth) is so remote and disconnected from his five-year-old son (Connor Maselli) that he leaves the child home alone–and that’s in a [...]

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The big news this week: The Oscars. Several Bay Area theaters will host their own Oscar telecasts, with comic commentary, costume contests, and other frivolity. See Oscars Away from Home for details.
Wednesday night the Balboa celebrates its 81st Birthday with a screening of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Black Pirate. Not his [...]

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Family Fantasy

Written by: Karey Kirkpatrick, David Berenbaum, and John Sayles, from the books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black
Directed by Mark Waters

Basically a horror movie for pre-teens (and all ages above), The Spiderwick Chronicles hits almost every note right. It starts off with a family in crisis–a nice, normal crisis of the sort that [...]

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Just a quick note to tell you about the Tiburon International Film Festival, which runs from March 13 to the 21st. According to the press release, it’s “showcasing over 225 films from 94 countries.”
The Festival opens (and not at the Castro, for a change, but at Tiburon’s own Playhouse Theater) with a Spanish comedy called Twins [...]

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Opening night is still more than two months away, but I’m already getting press releases for this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival. Here’s what I can tell you:

The Festival will open April 24 with The Last Mistress, “the latest film from acclaimed director Catherine Breillat.” I tried to watch one of her films, Sex [...]

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We think of westerns as a…as the…American genre. They’re our national myth; our way of defining ourselves as a people. But just as Hollywood has made medieval romances and tales from the Arabian Nights, other countries have made westerns. They’ve also let westerns influence their contemporary dramas and samurai films.
March 1 through April 26, SFMOMA [...]

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