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Blue Jasmine
It’s always felt like everyone’s been waiting for Woody Allen‘s legendary, ultra-prolific career to inevitably begin sputtering out. When he began really losing steam about a decade ago with duds like Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Melinda and...
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Red Flag (SFJFF Review)
Alex Karpovsky (most famously known for his work in Lena Dunham’s Girls and Tiny Furniture) plays an (assumedly) extra-neurotic version of himself á la Larry David in Red Flag, a meta dark comedy that’s somehow both navel-gazey and droningly indifferent. The...
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Downloaded
If you are in your mid-twenties to mid-thirties there is a good chance that you have used the program Napster to download music files from the internet. Back in the late ‘90s Napster exploded rapidly in popularity beyond just...
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Watch: 5 Paul Thomas Anderson and Fiona Apple Music Videos
P.T. Anderson (There Will be Blood, The Master), one of the most lauded directors of our generation, used to date Fiona Apple in the late ’90s. They were the perfect film/music geek power couple, and at the time were churning out...
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San Francisco Jewish Film Festival Coverage Introduction
Tonight marks the kick-off of the 33rd San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and with the fest’s advancing age comes a cinematic expansion of sorts. This year’s theme is “Life Through a Jew(ish) Lens”, the idea being that the films...
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The Hunt
No film released this year has left me more shattered during its end credits than Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt. The film has moments of immense power and at times is very hard to watch. The story, co-written by Vinterberg,...
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An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
Do not be confused by the title, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is by no means a simple film. The film is broken up into several parts, some of which include several sections within, containing a film within film...
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TIFF 2013: First wave of titles announced
It’s over a month away until the Toronto International Film Festival, which means that the waves of announcements have started to come in. Today, TIFF announced 75 films that will be playing in their Gala and Special Presentations programs...
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Post Tenebras Lux
If you combined the provocative tenacity of Ulrich Seidl with the non-narrative structure and beautiful cinematography of Terrence Malick then you would get somewhere close to Carlos Reygadas’ baffling Post Tenebras Lux. There is a narrative found within the...
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SF Silent Film Festival Diary
A few days before the San Francisco Silent Film Festival began last Thursday night at the Castro Theatre, I spoke with festival artistic director Anita Monga. She shared a touching story that couldn’t illustrate the beauty of silent film...
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Paradise: Faith
Almost immediately after I saw Paradise: Love at the Chicago International Film Festival last year I knew it would land towards the top of my favorite films of the year. Paradise: Love is an exploitation film where neither paradise...
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Electrick Children
You might have seen movies about teenage pregnancy before, but you’ve never seen them done like this. In a refreshing take on the topic, Rebecca Thomas’ debut Electrick Children gives us a story of immaculate conception that is easy...
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Europa Report
After seeing enough films on the subject, can we all agree that space travel outside the orbit of the earth seems to generally be a bad idea? This general consensus is why a film like Europa Report is able to...
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Watch: Crystal Fairy trailer
Our Bay Area readers will finally get a chance to see Michael Cera and Gaby Hoffman in Crystal Fairy when it hits theaters tonight. We learned in our interview with director Sebastian Silva and Cera that the story about...
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