Bayflicks.net

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. She even [...]

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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 the review.
Us [...]

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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 special [...]

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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 1985) trying [...]

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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 film also took [...]

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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 high-wattage cast, I [...]

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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 Luke Shapiro, a [...]

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Action Comedy

Written by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember
Directed by Peter Segal

I approach films based on old TV shows with suspicion, but the comic potential of Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart lowered my guard. But while Get Smart has its charms, it doesn’t fulfill that potential by a long shot.
Carell wisely doesn’t attempt to imitate [...]

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The July/August Pacific Film Archive schedule arrived in yesterday’s mail. It makes me want to move permanently into that theater.
They’re running five series this summer, honoring a director, a cinematographer, a novelist, a studio, and an aspect ratio.
The studio is United Artists, receiving its yet another 90th anniversary retrospective. But unlike the UA series at [...]

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