The Tiburon International Film Festival ends Friday, but be patient. The Sonoma International Film Festival opens Wednesday.
Double Bill: The Crowd & Our Daily Bread, Stanford, Friday, 7:30. Silent film was great for melodrama and better for comedy, but we don’t think o f it as the best medium for serious social drama. Yet few dramas are as enthralling, intelligent, or entertaining as The Crowd, King Vidor’s 
examination of the failed American dream and that failure’s effect on a marriage. Using actual locations, realistic and expressionistic sets, and the subtlety of the human face, Vidor creates two very real individuals and tracks the journey from simple American optimism to despair. With Dennis James at the organ. Our Daily Bread is Vidor’s talkie sort-of sequel to The Crowd, where our everyman and woman face the depression and start a communal farm. No masterpiece (I’m not a fan of Vidor’s talkies), but historically fascinating.
Best In Show, Cerrito, Tuesday, 9:15. Christopher Guest’s dog-show mockumentary has more than its share of hilarious moments. The rest of it is pretty funny, too. A benefit for EBAC.
The Reader, Castro, Sunday. I have to ask myself: Am I a Kate Winslet fan because she’s a brilliant actor with an excellent taste in scripts, or because she takes her clothes off in almost every film? Probably a combination of both. Here she plays her least sympathetic character, but you still care for her greatly. Questions of guilt, evil, and the corruption of innocence abound. But would the main male character (played by David Kross and Ralph Fiennes at different ages) really be that messed up just because he had an affair at 15?
The Wrestler, Castro, Friday. Yes, Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei both give outstanding performances; in Rourke’s case, it was as physically risky as it was emotionally so. And yes, the movie took me into a subculture I had never seen before. What’s more, it had what was probably the most difficult-to-watch sequence in my lifetime of movie-going. But there seemed to be something hollow inside the story, as if writer Robert D. Siegel and director Darren Aronofsky weren’t willing to plunge in as deeply as Rourke. And the ending was horribly clichéd. On a double-bill with Runaway Train.
Medicine for Melancholy, Elmwood, opens Friday. One could describe
this low-budget indi as the African-American version (and the Bay Area version) of Before Sunrise. We discover the two characters as they discover each other, maneuver around their mutual attraction, and talk about their very different attitudes about life and race. Wyatt Cenac (of the Daily Show) and Tracey Heggins make attractive and likable leads, and for the first hour they’re completely worth spending time with. But two-thirds of the way through the movie takes a wrong turn to nowhere. Beautifully shot with a color palette so desaturated it often looks like black and white. I saw Medicine for Melancholy at the 2008 San Francisco International Film Festival. Read my more in-depth report.
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writer/director Ari Folman had with other veterans of Israel’s 1982 Lebanon war, as he tries to reconstruct his own traumatic memories of the front line. But the interviews, and the flashbacks that illustrate them, are animated in a sparse yet aggressively 3D style. The result carries a documentary’s authenticity, but with a visual power that can only come out of the imagination. Extraordinary.
Karloff plays him as a child in a too-large body, the ultimate outcast torn between his need for love and his anger at the society that’s rejected him. If the blind hermit sequence doesn’t bring tears, you’re either dead, too cynical, or have seen Young Frankenstein’s brilliant parody of this scene once too often. With Colin Clive as the not-so-good doctor, Ernest Thesiger as a delightfully over-the-top even madder scientist, and Elsa Lanchester as both Mary Shelley and the monster’s mate (although, technically speaking, Valerie Hobson is the Bride of Frankenstein). One of the rare sequels better than the original. On a double-bill with The Sin of Nora Moran, which I’ve never heard of.
making ace reporter Hildy Johnson a woman (Rosalind Russell), and scheming editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) her ex-husband. And thus was born one of the funniest screwball comedies of them all–“with a bit of serious drama thrown in about an impending execution. On a screwball double bill with Twentieth Century.
Award for acting. (No, Peter J. Owens wasn’t an actor; he was a philanthropist.) He’ll receive the award at a big, expensive, black-tie affair April 30. But the night before he’ll be at the 
Lebanon war, as he tries to reconstruct his own traumatic memories of the front line. But the interviews, and the flashbacks that illustrate them, are animated in a sparse yet aggressively 3D style. The result carries a documentary’s authenticity, but with a visual power that can only come out of the imagination. Extraordinary.
young woman (newcomer Wei Tang as Wang Jiazhi) who must turn herself into someone she is not in order to seduce a man and set him up for assassination. Her target (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) is a monster–a fascist collaborator who never appears to regret his actions. But he’s a human monster, and there’s a sense that his work is taking a psychic toll. He’s cold, remote, and emotionally cut off from those around him. No wonder he falls for the beautiful young woman who comes into his life. Yes, its rated NC-17 for graphic sex scenes, and yes, those scenes enhance the plot. but if you go to Lust, Caution looking for arousal, you’re going to be disappointed. Go looking for a compelling story, insightful characters, and masterful filmmaking. Click 
thing writer Peter Morgan teaches us in the other Oscar bate movie set in the 1970s. Michael Sheen plays David Frost as insufferably upbeat, which is probably accurate, and Frank Langella creates a complex Nixon who’s almost charming in his willingness to admit his lack of charm. Of course, he admits a lot more before Frost is through with him. Has anyone else noticed that as he ages, Kevin Bacon is starting to look like Clint Eastwood?
