Reviews of albums, films, concerts, and more from the Bay Area Music and Movie Nerds
Croatian filmmaker Daina Oniunas-Pusic has earned multiple awards for her short films, and now parlays that talent on to the big screen with Tuesday, her terrific feature film debut. A contemplative and serious meditation on life, death, grief, and letting go, Oniunas-Pusic’s film never feels heavy-handed, even as it grapples with some of life’s most weighty philosophical questions.
Robert De Niro and Bobby Cannavale have acted together once before, in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 mob drama The Irishman. But casting them as father and son is a brilliant idea, and, if nothing else, actor/director Tony Goldwyn’s new film Ezra at least offers audiences that long overdue delight.
The summer blockbuster movies season is still a few weeks away, but in the interim two very different smaller pictures featuring female protagonists open today. Are they worth seeing? Read on to find out!
Continue reading “Film Reviews: “Babes” and “Back to Black””
The 67th SFFilm Festival opens tomorrow, Wednesday, April 24th, and will run through Sunday, April 28th. The Festival is presenting over 45 programs featuring films from 40 countries in venues in San Francisco and Berkeley. We’ve already previewed five of the Fest’s films (two documentaries and three narratives), and below we take a look at five more narrative features:
Continue reading “Film Feature: 67th SFFILM Festival Preview #2”
Based on a true story, Wicked Little Letters is a charming period piece that reunites the terrific actresses Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman, both of whom played the same character at different ages in 2021’s The Lost Daughter. While they share no scenes in that film, their new movie provides a welcome vehicle for showcasing their spirited chemistry.
The 96th Academy Awards air tomorrow, Sunday, March 10th, on ABC at a new, earlier 4:00 pm PST start time. Friendly reminder to fellow film fans: don’t forget to spring forward for daylight savings, or you might miss the start of the show! Below, Spinning Platters film critics Carrie Kahn and Chad Liffmann share their predictions and thoughts for the major categories. Although we feel smug when our picks win, we don’t mind some upsets to keep things interesting! You can print your own ballot here. Good luck to all!
Continue reading “Film Feature: Carrie and Chad Pick the 2024 Oscars”
Following in his big brother Joel’s footsteps, Ethan Coen steps outside the pair’s successful filmmaking partnership with Drive-Away Dolls, his first solo narrative feature. Unfortunately, Ethan doesn’t do as well as his brother did with his 2021 award-winning The Tragedy of Macbeth. Drive-Away Dolls probably won’t win any awards, but it’s a serviceable, if mostly forgettable, attempt at a retro, low-brow comedy.
In the early 2000s, filmmaker Laura Chinn was a teenager living with her mother in Clearwater, Florida. Chinn’s older brother Max, terminally ill with brain cancer, spent the last few days of his life in a hospice center with an internationally famous resident: Terri Schiavo. Schiavo’s right-to-die legal case spanned fifteen years, from 1998 until 2005, when the courts finally allowed her husband to remove her feeding tube. In Chinn’s feature film debut, she turns this grim early experience into Suncoast, a fictional, semi-autobiographical tear-jerker of a movie with a few tonal problems, but also much to recommend it.
Released today in the middle of what seems like unending gray Bay Area winter weather, Sometimes I Think About Dying is the perfect film to watch given our collective dreary mood.
Continue reading “Film Review: “Sometimes I Think About Dying””
The new French film Driving Madeleine will no doubt remind American viewers of 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy and 2018’s Green Book, two award-winning American movies about disparate characters connecting because of a car ride. But Driving Madeleine (or Une Belle Course, its original French title) removes the racial themes and white savior narratives that garnered criticism of the latter two films, and it’s all the better for it. While slightly predictable, Driving Madeleine is a charming, intelligent, and warm character study. If you can’t take a Sunday drive through Paris any time soon, watching this film makes for a great substitute.
