Reviews of albums, films, concerts, and more from the Bay Area Music and Movie Nerds
The 2021 San Francisco International Film Festival concluded yesterday, and announced its awards on Saturday. Those can be found here, but we have a final wrap up, too – nine capsules highlighting some of the Festival offerings – six dramas and three documentaries. Check them out below, and see you next year!
Continue reading “Film Feature: SFFILM Festival Spotlights #4”
Let me say up front that what you are reading will be a completely spoiler-free review of the new, ninth and final Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker. So read on without fear. I want to be careful about revealing any of the film’s surprises, since, if you’re a fan of the franchise — especially a Gen X’er one like me — you’ve waited a long time for this finale, and you deserve to watch it fresh. Instead, I’m going to talk about feeling, because feeling is big in this film.
Continue reading “Film Review: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker“
“Every once in awhile I have what I think of as an out-of-the-body experience at a movie,” wrote a rapturous Roger Ebert in the summer of 1977 of Star Wars. Later that year a more skeptical Pauline Kael, writing about the same film, said, “the loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, the relentless pacing drive every idea from your head.” Never could the duality of responses to the Star Wars series of films be better predicted. They are either the greatest experiences in a movie theater since L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, or the biggest waste of time since Birdemic: Shock and Terror. Continue reading “Film Review: Star Wars: The Last Jedi“
“It’s hard to believe this could happen in America,” a character says in Detroit, director Kathryn Bigelow’s grim but brilliantly effective new film about the 1967 Detroit riots and their aftermath. But for those of us watching exactly 50 years later, such believing is all too easy — and that’s perhaps the most disheartening take away from Bigelow’s gut-punch of a film.
Continue reading “Film Review: Detroit“
