Until yesterday, I’d never seen a film by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Feeling a need to rectify that, and suspecting that I couldn’t stomach Salo, I watched The Gospel According to St. Matthew last night. If you have any sense of film history, you can’t watch this stark, low-budget, black-and-white, telling of the life of Christ [...]
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I’ve previewed three films coming to IndieFest. Here’s what I thought about them. B+ The Drummond Will, Roxie, Friday, February 4, 7:00; Sunday, February 6, 2:30; Monday, February 7, 7:00. No one can make murder funny like the British. In this low-budget comedy, two very different brothers inherent a ramshackle house from the father neither [...]
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They’re out, and there are no real surprises. But I still have a couple of comments: Like everyone else, I’m assuming that either The Social Network or The King’s Speech will win Best Picture and its almost constant companion, Best Director. Both of them could win Best Screenplay, however. The King’s Speech, based on historical [...]
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It was dark. It was dangerous. Lust, greed, and fear hung heavily in the air. It was enough to drive you crazy. That’s right. I spent Saturday at the Castro with two Noir City double bills. That’s four pictures from the 40s and early 50s I’d never seen before. While the movies where dark and [...]
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I saw five movies theatrically over Friday and Saturday, all of them in black and white. I started Friday night with a screening at the Shattuck of Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today. The director’s daughter, Sandra Schulberg, who also oversaw the restoration of this 1946 documentary, spoke before and after the screening. Her father, Stuart [...]
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I tend to put film festivals into three categories. First, you’ve got identity festivals, which focus on the many ethnic, religious, racial, and gender ways in which people group themselves (the Jewish Film Festival, Frameline, and so one). Second, you have genre festivals, which look at particular kinds of movies (Noir City, Silent Film Festival). [...]
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