What’s Screening: July 7 – 13

~ Lincoln Spector

This week, we have films from Japan, Italy, Mexico, and Warner Brothers. Most of them are pretty good – and all of them will be better in a theater.

Festivals & Series

New films opening theatrically

B+ The YouTube Effect, opens at the New Mission, Friday

I’m a YouTube addict. I watch lectures, recent TV news, comedy, and yes…adorable animals. But this documentary isn’t about that sort of entertainment. At first, The YouTube Effect felt like a very long commercial for that very popular website. But then the scary stuff appears. There’s a father who can’t get the video of his daughter’s murder off the Internet. The alt-right and other dangerous groups grow easily on the Internet. YouTube has become a powerful weapon to spread hate. The movie becomes a difficult film to watch, but one that everyone should see. Director Alex Winter will be at the New Mission for Q&A Thursday at 7:30pm.

Another chance to see (theatrically)

B+ Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Lark
֍ Saturday, 10:00am, dubbed
֍ Sunday, 3:00pm, subtitled
֍ Monday, 4:00pm, subtitled

I don’t know when Studio Ghibli started making animated movies targeted for the American and European market. This one, based on a novel by Diana Wynne Jones (certainly not a Japanese name), seems set in a fantasized Europe in the early 20th century. The story deals with a useless war, a handsome wizard with a very bad yellow streak, a courageous girl turned into an old woman, and, of course, the moving castle of the story. The design and hand-drawn animation are exceptional.

Double bills

A Cary Grant double bill: Only Angels Have Wings & His Girl Friday, Stanford, double bills start at 3:30, 5:45, 7:30

His Girl Friday: Howard Hawks turned the hit play The Front Page into a love triangle by changing a major character’s gender, and so was born one of the funniest screwball comedies of them all–with some of the fastest dialog ever recorded.
Only Angels Have Wings: Cary Grant heads a team of mail plane pilots in a remote corner of South America. There’s little plot here, just a study of men who routinely fly under extremely dangerous conditions. Directed by Howard Hawks.

Theatrical revivals

A+ Bicycle Thieves (1948), Balboa, Thursday, 7:30pm

If the point of cinema is to create empathy, both for the characters on the screen and for real people, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves is the greatest film ever made. It’s about desperate poverty, and how the desperately poor feed on other desperately poor because they have no other options. When someone steals Antonio’s bicycle, it threatens the struggling man’s ability to feed his wife and children. Antonio and his young son must wander through Rome, searching desperately for the precious machine that will keep them from starving. Read my Blu-ray review.

A+ 8 1/2 (1963), BAMPFA, Thursday, 7:00pm

Funny, exhilarating, perplexing, and tragic, 8½ is not only the greatest film ever made about writer’s block. It’s also the ultimate cinematic statement on the male midlife crisis. The film is about making a movie, and the movie that’s being made appears to be 8½. Filled with one memorable and unique scene after another, Fellini’s autobiographical surreal comedy lacks nothing except a coherent plot, and it has no use for that. Read my A+ appreciation. Part of the series Claudia Cardinale Once Upon a Time.

A Memento (2000), Roxie, Wednesday, 6:40pm

35mm! Before he started making Batman movies, Christopher Nolan created one low-budget, terrific thriller. Guy Pearce is a man bent on identifying, and then killing, the man who murdered his wife. But due to a brain injury, he can’t hold a memory long – making him dangerous to himself and others. The film is told mostly from end to start, so that like the protagonist, you don’t know what just happened.

A Key Largo (1948), 4-Star, Saturday, 5:00pm

In the 1930’s, movie stars like Edward G. Robinson got to kill punk character actors like Humphrey Bogart. But by 1948, Bogey was the top star and Robinson the supporting player (and a great one). Set in a lonely Florida hotel during a hurricane, most of the movie is talk, but when Richard Brooks and John Huston adopt a Maxwell Anderson stage play, and Huston directs a solid and charismatic cast, who needs more than talk?

A Spirited Away (2001), 4-Star, Saturday & Sunday, 10:00am

Dubbed! Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece is a beautiful, complex, and occasionally scary tale of a young girl cast into a strange and magical world. The intriguing and imaginative creatures, not to mention the moral dilemmas, are beyond anything that Dorothy ever had to deal with in Oz. A truly amazing work of animation.

A- The Exterminating Angel (1962), BAMPFA, Saturday, 7:00pm

An upper-class dinner party becomes a long and dangerous ordeal in Luis Buñuel’s kind-of-comic fable about the thin skin of civilization. Twenty odd aristocrats and one very loyal butler, all dressed up properly, discover that they simply can’t leave the room. They don’t know why, and neither do we, but they just can’t take that step. Soon they’re breaking walls to find water pipes, but they inevitably run out of food and patience. Slowly, the whole veneer of civilization disappears. Part of the series Luis Buñuel’s Magnificent Weapon.

C+ Dark Passage (1947), 4-Star, Saturday, 7:30pm

Not all Bogart/Becall movies are masterpieces. Consider this one: First, you don’t see Bogart’s face in the first 37 minutes, and it’s more than an hour before we see all of it. He’s been wrongfully convicted for murdering his wife, and Bogie changes his face through plastic surgery. But the movie has so many plot holes that it becomes ridiculous. On the good side, the film was largely shot in a San Francisco that no longer exists.

Films of historical interest

? Horror of Dracula (1958), Balboa, Tuesday, 7:30pm

35mm! I haven’t seen this early Hammer horror movie in decades, but I have fond memories of it. I remember a stylish, lurid, and for 1958, a rather sexy adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel.

Continuing engagements

Movies I can’t review

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Published by Lincoln Spector

Lincoln Spector writes about cinema, technology, and cinema technology. From 1986 through 2008, he wrote Gigglebytes, the first technology-oriented humor column. From 1977 through 2016, he wrote PC World's Answer Line column and blog.