San Francisco Indiefest used to hold its Documentary Film Festival (called DocFest for short) in late spring--just after the San Francisco International Film Festival. Now they have it in late summer/early fall, just before Mill Valley. This year, DocFest occupies the Roxie from September 29 through October 10. I haven't seen any of the films … Continue reading Documentaries and Hand-Colored Silents

Cruising, one-week engagement starts Friday. Now that the controversy has passed, we can see William Friedkin's 1980 gay S&M murder mystery for what it is: a mess. While it may offer nostalgia for older gay men who miss their wilder days, it has little to offer the rest of us. As a study of a … Continue reading This Week’s Movies

William Friedkin's Cruising earned nothing but controversy and bad reviews when it came out in 1980. The controversy came from a gay community that had only recently won a modicum of political respectability. Openly homosexual images and characters were almost unheard of in Hollywood films of those days, and a knife-wielding murderer preying on the … Continue reading Cruising for a Bruising

The Savages, Sequoia Theatre, Mill Valley, Thursday, 7:00. Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman both turn in brilliant performances (what else do you expect) as siblings coping with a father losing himself into dementia. Not that they feel much love towards this father (Philip Bosco), whose parenting skills were apparently only slightly better than those … Continue reading A Lebowski-Free Week

Revolution Summer, Roxie, opens Friday. Young people looking for sex, drugs, and violent revolution wander through a predominately-white Oakland in a film allegedly set today but feeling like the early 1970's. The acting by young unknowns is uniformly excellent, especially Mackenzie Firgens in the starring role. But the slow pace, overuse of close-ups, and clumsy … Continue reading This Week’s Movies

The Cerrito Classics series looked like a big hit when the theater launched it late last year. The very first presentation, The Wizard of Oz, sold out both shows. If the first screening I attended, Rear Window in January, didn't sell out, it was close. Audiences seemed to appreciate the fact that, even if a … Continue reading Less Classics at the Cerrito

To the Stars by Hard Ways, Pacific Film Archive, Friday, 8:45. I saw this environmentally-themed space adventure, the Soviet Union's answer to Star Trek and Star Wars, many, many years ago. I remember being impressed with the first half but less so as it went along. According to the PFA's description, an English-dubbed version called … Continue reading This Week’s Movies

England in the '60's. Cross dressers in the --˜20s. Gay bars in the --˜80s. All in September and October. Some interesting stuff on the way. First, there's the new Pacific Film Archive schedule, which includes Look Back at England: The British New Wave, a series of 17 then cutting-edge English films from the late 1950's … Continue reading Previews of Coming Attractions

No End in Sight, Rafael, ongoing. You may think you know how badly the administration bungled the war in Iraq, but Charles Ferguson's documentary tells the story so carefully, so dispassionately, and so authoritatively that you’re awed by the enormity of these people’s incompetence and the tragedy of its results. And you feel in your … Continue reading This Week’s Movies