I discovered something about myself this weekend. I can only watch so many silent films in three days. I attended all but two events at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival this weekend. I had a great time, but I feel like I fried my mind. A quick overview: The General Vibe There’s more to [...]
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Spoof Written and directed by Anna Biller Anna Biller wants to out-auteur Charlie Chaplin. Not only did she write, direct, and co-produce this parody of late sixties/early seventies exploitation flicks, but she stars in the title role. She also wrote some of the songs, animated a drug-induced dream sequence, and designed the sets and costumes. [...]
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[B] Coming-of-age Drama Written and directed by Céline Sciamma Full Disclosure: The Water Lillies reviewer DVD I screened cropped this 1.85:1 movie to a 4×3 frame, cutting off a quarter of the image. Even some of the subtitles were cropped. I have no way of knowing how much this hurt the film. Now, on with [...]
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Owning a movie on DVD shouldn’t keep you from seeing it theatrically. After all, if you love it enough to buy it, you should love it enough to leave the house and see it under the best possible conditions. I’m seeing three such films this week–four if you count Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence is a [...]
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I’ve seen a record eight movies coming to the Jewish Film Festival (okay, one’s actually a TV series). Here’s what I think of them, in order from Masterpiece to What were they thinking? Emotional Arithmetic In the best performance of an excellent career, Susan Sarandon plays an American-born Holocaust survivor (the story is set in [...]
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Animated family science fiction Written by Andrew Stanton and Jim Capobianco Directed by Andrew Stanton Andrew Stanton and Pixar made a courageous movie. When Disney finances your big-budget family entertainment, it takes guts to look closely and critically at such consequences of our consumer culture as garbage, obesity, and planetary destruction. Making an almost dialog-free [...]
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Drama Written by Jefferson Lewis, from a book by Matt Cohen Directed by Paolo Barzman When you attend a lot of film festivals, you’re often amazed and disappointed about what doesn’t get a regular release. As I write this, Emotional Arithmetic has no American distributor. Considering not only the film’s exceptional quality but also its [...]
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Quite a selection this week. Who says revival cinema is dead! Stagecoach, Pacific Film Archive, Tuesday, 7:30. How hard is it to see great westerns on the big screen these days? In the 3 1/2 years I’ve maintained this web site, this is my first chance to recommend you catch John Ford’s 1939 masterpiece. Nine [...]
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Dramatic comedy Written and directed by Jonathan Levine I knew Ben Kingsley was a brilliant actor, but I didn’t know he could turn himself into Harvey Keitel. As a drugged-out New York psychiatrist, he looks astonishingly like Keitel, and hardly ever sounds British. Although Kingsley gets top billing, Josh Peck gets the central role of [...]
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