Just in case the San Francisco International Film Festival leaves you wanting movies that are short, cheap, to-the-point, and both entertaining and depressing, the Roxie will offer a solution:
From May 15 to the 28, they’ll screen I Wake Up Dreaming: the Haunted World of the B Film Noir, a series of 29 little-known, low-budget noirs from the 40s and 50s–most of them in double-bills.
Should be fun.
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Yesterday I attended press screenings of two films that will play at the San Fran International Film Festival. Both of them will have regular (or at least limited) runs after the festival, so they’re not now-or-never opportunities.
I’ve written longer reviews of each, which will go live just before their post-festival releases.
Adoration, Kabuki, Saturday, 6:15; Pacific Film Archive, Monday, 6:30. Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan outdoes 
himself in this story of a teenage boy of half Anglo, half Arabic decent who creates a fiction of his late father as a terrorist, and posts it on the Internet. Yet Adoration is not about a scandal on the Internet. Egoyan has a more intriguing and touching story to tell. It’s about the people left behind after a couple suddenly die, and how they react to and avoid each others’ grief, even years after the event. Not to be missed.
Soul Power, Kabuki, Sunday, 5:45. In 1974, many of the greatest African and 
African-American musicians alive came together in Zaire for a big all-star concert. We finally get the film version 35 years later, and it’s worth the wait. After a boring first half hour, American stars like James Brown and B.B. King play their best, excited to be home in their ancestral continent. And African stars little known in this country include the amazing Miriam Makeba, who does things with her voice I didn’t know were possible. I wish this movie was longer.
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