Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · Reviews
Celebrating activism and exposing some of the more chaotic corners of world politics Despite an avalanche of news and quasi-news programs, tabloid yakfests, and crudities like Cops, Survivor, and the[…]
Asian · Directors · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Resurrection and renewal in postwar Japanese cinema, as seen through Tomu’s 1955 masterpiece Following Japan’s surrender in World War II, the colonial tables were turned. The Chinese took control of[…]
All’s quiet on the cinematic front in this seductive survey of the artful ’20s Superman had his Fortress of Solitude; San Francisco has its Silent Film Festival. This annual event,[…]
Gangbangers, sex robots, and babydykes, oh my! Now in its 19th year, the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) has become an increasingly plush and rather important venue for[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
A bumper crop of docs scale the heights and trawl the depths of queer culture “There was nothing to come out to. We never heard the word homosexual. The media[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
The illustrious history of the king of the hepcats (and the queen of deadpan) Louis Prima and his wife Keely Smith were a staple of ’50s and ’60s variety TV,[…]
“I guess it all works if you revere Stephen Sondheim.” Have you been kicking yourself ever since May 3, 1970, when you weren’t there for the marathon recording session that[…]
“Some of the mise-en-scene has a suffocating beauty, as in the bravura marriage sequence where the screen is clogged to the breaking point with images – a strategy that shows[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“Shall we take it straight through?” Swing Time is the last Fred & Ginger musical to have it all – lots of great songs from Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields,[…]
Asian · Historical & Epic · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Truly subversive or mere cinematic “seasoning,” in the director’s own phrase? I am the first to admit that Oshima Nagisa’s Gohatto (1999, more literally “Against the Law,” but titillatingly translated[…]
Some bright lights and a few dim bulbs distinguish this year’s preeminent indie showcase Now in its third year, the IndieFest (formally known as the San Francisco Independent Film Festival)[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · Reviews
Archival footage, dramatizations, and dark satire capture the dire end-of-century events in the former Yugoslavia Film after film bombards the eye with images of destruction: buildings split open, their wire[…]
Louis Hayward in tights! Edgar Ulmer’s reputation rests largely on a series of no-budget, claustrophobic noirs and thrillers like Strange Illusion, Bluebeard, and of course Detour. But this director was[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
The best jazz documentary just got better Turn a fashion photographer loose on the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, and what do you get? Lots of artsy-fartsy shots of sea,[…]
A beachhouse, no parents, and the fleeting pleasures of “krampach” Coming-of-age dramas are dicey material at best, ever in danger of succumbing to John Hughes-style clichés about bourgeois brats, or[…]
Asian · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
These boys mix it up, sort of, in India’s first gay indie Writer-director Kaizad Gustad’s Bombay Boys (1998) is, of course, not the first Indian film to deal “seriously” with[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
“No actual fucking!” as the author says, but there are plenty of other pleasures in this lurid ’60s rarity whose authorship remains contested. American International Picture’s De Sade (starring Keir[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Horror · Pre-Code · Reviews
The normals are the real freaks in this still gut-wrenching horror classic Production Notes In mid-1931, MGM production head Irving Thalberg summoned scenarist Willis Goldbeck to tell him the time[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
There may be trouble ahead.” Follow the Fleet is perhaps the most problematic film in the Astaire/Rogers series. It has an excruciatingly bad plot; it has a singularly lame performance[…]
Crime · Reviews · Thrillers & Action
Scorsese’s wiseguy gangsters as modern-day knights errant In medieval times there were no countries and few strong kings. Monks hid in fortress monasteries while marauding knights brutalized the peasants. Most[…]
