The 66th SFFilm Festival opens tomorrow, Thursday, April 13th, and will run through Sunday, April 23rd. Tomorrow’s opening night premiere – a documentary about Steph Curry — is sold out for advance tickets and at rush (if you want to show up and take your chances), but luckily there’s tons more cool stuff to see over the next week and a half. Here we present just a taste: a look at four upcoming screenings — two documentaries and two narrative features. Continue reading “Film Feature: 66th SFFilm Festival Spotlights”
Clarkson and Kingsley reason to see slight but likable picture
Darwan (Ben Kingsley) and Wendy (Patricia Clarkson) get to know each other during a break from her driving lesson.
Spanish director Isabel Coixet (Paris, je t’aime; My Life Without Me) must have enjoyed working with Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley in her well-received 2008 film Elegy, since she’s collaborating with them again here in Learning to Drive. While this vehicle (no pun intended) is more lightweight than Coixet’s earlier picture, its characters are equally compelling, and it makes for a pleasant enough end-of-summer movie outing.
Exodus highlights the ongoing battle between traditional and modern filmmaking, and neither side really wins.
Battle Moses. Complete with armor, shiny sword, and unidentifiable accent.
Exodus: Gods and Kings was bound to be a spectacular epic, considering the biblical source material and the director at the helm, Sir Ridley Scott. Scott echoed this projection when he said that Exodus: Gods and Kings is his “biggest” movie yet. Considering his long resume of major titles, that’s quite a statement and yet it’s true. The sets, the action, the effects, and the scope are all monumental, and these are mainly where the movie succeeds. It’s heartwarming to know that there’s still room for traditional sandal epics in the modern film business, featuring a good amount of built sets and armies of real actors (as opposed to CGI backdrops and armies…though these are still employed here as well). But trying to keep to tradition comes with a price, and some poor decisions. Exodus is weakest (and most controversial) in its casting choices and artistic breaks from the source material, but these falters can’t keep Exodus from providing a mostly exciting experience.
Yes, that’s a somewhat dejected looking Tony Stark. Why the long face when his new movie has a shot at earning one billion dollars at the worldwide box office? Well, there IS something Tony can be sad about — with The Avengers 2, Thor: The Dark World,Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and likely a few more Marvel films on the horizon, this may be the last Iron Maninstallment for quite some time, if not ever. When Iron Man 3 takes advantage of that fact and pulls out all the stops, not including an unnecessarily complex plot and superfluous CGI, it’s a whole ton of explosive fun.
