With San Francisco’s big film festival only three weeks away, the–um–provinces are racing to get their festivals in first. The Sonoma Film Festival opens Wednesday. Then the Oakland and Tiburon International Film Festivals both open on Thursday. Back in the City, the San Francisco International Women’s Film Festival also opens Wednesday.
D Potiche, Clay, Shattuck, Rafael, opens Friday. This alleged comedy wastes two of France’s great stars–Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu–in an unfunny 
feminist fantasy set in the late 1970′s. The period setting is played for laughs–but doesn’t actually earn any. The same goes for the politics and characters. Most of Potiche is predictable; the rest of it is so bad I never would have predicted it. In her late 60s, Deneuve is still a remarkably attractive woman, but Depardieu has put on so much weight I worried about his health. Read my full review.
An Evening with Les Blank, Red Vic, Thursday, 7:30. The great, always-entertaining anthropological documentarian (and Bay Area resident) will present two of his popular films from decades passed: The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins and his look at New Orleans street celebrations, Always for Pleasure. Lest you think this is a full double feature, I should mention that the films’ combined running time is about 90 minutes. The $15 admission includes rice and beans cooked from Blank’s own recipe.
A Nora’s Will, Rafael, Saturday & Sunday, 12 noon. A woman sets her table for a big family dinner, carefully arranges her apartment, then takes her own life. Over the next
few days, her family and religious community will grapple with their feelings for her, each other, and Judaism. The film concentrates on the deceased’s ex-husband, José (Fernando Luján)–an atheist of the rabid, Richard Dawkins variety. José couldn’t care less about the approaching Passover seder (Nora timed her demise carefully), or about the problems of providing a suicide with a proper Jewish burial. But his son and daughter-in-law care, and he cares about them. He’s going to learn a lot in those five days. Read my full review.
A The African Queen, Castro, Saturday and Sunday. Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Africa, and Technicolor all make for splendid entertainment in John
Huston’s romantic comedy action adventure. The start of World War I traps an earthy working-class mechanic (Bogart) and a prim and proper missionary (Hepburn) behind enemy lines and hundreds of miles of jungle. It’s a bum and a nun on the run. They face rapids, insects, alcohol (he’s for it; she’s against it), German guns, and an unusual (for Hollywood) romance between two moderately-attractive middle-aged people in filthy clothes. Paramount recently restored the film and issued this new print. Judging from the Blu-ray release (see my review), it should look fantastic.
A- The Battleship Potemkin, Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, Saturday, 7:30. Make no mistake: This ground-breaking movie is simplistic Communist propaganda. The 
workers and sailors are all good comrades working together for a better world. The officers, aristocrats, and Cossacks are vile filth who deserve to die. A couple of them are so evil they actually twirl their mustaches. But its effective propaganda. The story of mutiny, celebration, attack, and escape stirs your blood. And it does this primarily through editing techniques that were revolutionary in 1925 and still impressive today. More than 85 years after it was shot, the Odessa Steps massacre is still one of the greatest, if not the greatest, action sequence ever edited. Read my essay. The museum will also screen a Charley Chase and a Will Rogers short. Bruce Loeb will accompany everything on piano. I’ve heard through a mutual friend that Bruce "will be dusting off" a score of his based on the Prokofieff opus 12 suite of pieces from 1913.
A The Housemaid, Red Vic, Tuesday and Wednesday. This picture’s US distributor, IFC Films, is calling it an "erotic thriller." Erotic? Definitely. But it’s not like any thriller I’ve ever seen – and I mean that in the best possible way. A young woman (Do-yeon 
Jeon) takes a job as a nanny and second-tier maid for a very wealthy couple. That the husband takes advantage of the new employee isn’t really a problem – you have to expect that from a born-wealthy young man with a pregnant wife. But when the young woman becomes pregnant (she seems to be the last to know), the wife, her mother, and the older, more experienced maid consider her womb a threat. With its spotless, almost antiseptic imagery, its difficult-to-read protagonist, and its sense of a world and a class system deeply out of joint, this one creeps into your bones and makes you shutter. Read my full review.
A Touch of Evil, Castro, Thursday. Orson Welles’ film noir classic, and one of his few Hollywood studio features. He lacked the freedom he found in Europe, but the bigger budget–and perhaps even the studio oversight–resulted in one of his best. As a corrupt border-town sheriff, Welles makes a bloated, scary, yet strangely sympathetic villain. Janet Leigh is a lovely and effective damsel in distress (although Psycho should have taught her to avoid seedy motels). As the hero, a brilliant Mexican detective, Charlton Heston is…well, he’s miscast, but not as badly as some people say. On a double bill with Welles’ Lady From Shanghai, which I haven’t seen in many years and didn’t like then.
B+ Wings of Desire, Pacific Film Archive, Saturday, 8:30. Wim Wenders’ fantasy about angels in Berlin offers a view of the city as a land of interior monologues. Two angels (Bruno Ganz, and Otto Sander) watch over the people, listen to their thoughts, and comfort them in their pain. Then one of them (Ganz) falls in love with a trapeze artist, and finds himself longing for mortality. Wenders couldn’t have known it when he made the film in 1988, but he was capturing the last months of a divided city; the wall seen in the film would soon come down. With Peter Falk as an unnamed American actor who is, I suspect, supposed to be Peter Falk. Claire Denis worked on this film as an assistant, qualifying it for the PFA series Under the Skin: The Films of Claire Denis.
B Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Castro, Friday. Tim Burton’s first feature revels in its own 
silliness. Pee-Wee Herman, before children’s television and indecent exposure, is a strange, almost neurotically innocent creature. The movie is uneven, and most of the jokes are extremely dumb, but the oddball charm cannot be denied. Besides, the last sequence, reworking the plot as a Hollywood action flick, is alone worth the price of admission. On a Burton double-bill with Edward Scissorhands, which I barely remember not liking.
B+ Black Swan, Red Vic, Sunday and Monday. Natalie Portman loses her grip on reality (and wins an Oscar) in this over-the-top psychological melodrama set in the world of ballet. Between her dominating mother, the artistic director trying to awaken her suppressed sexuality (for art, of course, but there might be some lust involved), and the other ballerinas who may be friends or enemies, she has a lot on her mind. No wonder she has a hard time holding on to it. Deliciously fun entertainment. Not to be confused with the 1942 Tyrone Power pirate movie, The Black Swan, which is also deliciously fun entertainment.
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