Bayflicks.net

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Two of my biggest passions–Judaism and cinema–come together this summer like they do every summer for the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. (Come to think of it, some of my other big passions–music, history, and sex–turn up here, as well.) The organizers are calling the 28th SFIFF the largest one ever, with “70 films from [...]

[Read more →]

School is out, and parents yearn for quiet. What better time to get out of the house and watch a silent film?
Perhaps that’s why the Bay Area’s two big weekend-long celebrations of movies with live music come two weeks apart in late June and early July. If you’ve never experienced that unique blend of live [...]

[Read more →]

When people think of San Francisco, horror, science fiction, and people of African descent don’t immediately leap to mind. But lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgenders truly fit the shallow, stereotyped model. So it’s appropriate that as the Black Film Festival and Another Hole in the Head draw to a close, Frameline32: San Francisco [...]

[Read more →]

What could be scarier than another film festival starting less than a month after the San Francisco International festival closes? How about two film such festivals? And one of them sounds very scary, indeed.
Let’s start with the festival that won’t give you a fright (although judging from recent exit polls, it might scare people in [...]

[Read more →]