This year’s edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival will transpire in theaters around the city from April 19 to May 3. Last year’s SFIFF marked the Bay Area premieres of such critically acclaimed hits as Beginners, Another Earth, and The Future. This year’s reliably diverse lineup looks just as promising, featuring new work from actors like Shirley MacLaine, Jack Black, Diane Kruger, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Greta Gerwig, John Krasinski, Freida Pinto, Emily Blunt, Val Kilmer, Lili Taylor, James Franco, Susan Sarandon, and Common, filmmakers like Richard Linklater, Michael Winterbottom, Lynn Shelton, Andrea Arnold, Lena Dunham, and little-known local winemaker Francis Ford Coppola, and documentaries on subjects ranging from Diana Vreeland and Marina Abramovic to ACT UP and the epidemic of sexual violence against women in the military. The festival will also feature several events, notably tributes to Kenneth Branagh and Judy Davis (both of whom will attend), a Midnight Mass tribute to the late Ken Russell featuring a Peaches Christ-hosted screening of Tommy, and perhaps most awesomely, a program of Buster Keaton short films with live musical accompaniment by Merrill Garbus and her tUnE-yArDs crew.
After the jump, we break down the 20 films we’re most excited to see this year into three categories: World Cinema, New Directors, and Documentaries. All film descriptions are courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.
World Cinema
USA, 2011, 99 min
Explaining the proper methods to superglue eyelids closed and adjust a corpse’s smile, Bernie Tiede (Jack Black) warns, “You cannot have grief tragically becoming comedy.” But can it be funny when someone dies and no one cares? A former evangelist who arrives in Carthage, Texas, to take a job as an assistant funeral director, Tiede uses his magnetic personality, seemingly never-ending skill set and Harold Hill–style of confidence to become the most popular man in town. A sweetheart with “the ability to make the world seem kind,” Tiede even manages to charm Marjorie Nugent (a maniacally frenzied Shirley MacLaine), the local rich widow whom everyone else despises and fears. Eventually, though, Nugent’s abuses become too much for someone in Carthage to take, and once relentless district attorney Danny Buck (Matthew McConaughey) is on the case, even the nicest guy around isn’t above suspicion. Based on a hard-to-believe true story, originally reported by journalist and cowriter Skip Hollandsworth, Bernie features a number of scene-stealing Carthage residents in supporting roles. With this affectionate black comedy, director Richard Linklater returns to the East Texas of his youth to showcase the strange heart of small town life, where, as one character puts it, “people will always suspect the worst, but they’ll also suspect the best.”
—Ryan Prendiville
France/Spain, 2012, 99 min
Sumptuous and intimate, Benoît Jacquot’s portrayal of court life at Versailles during four crucial days in July 1789 observes at close range the social decay that brought down the monarchy. In this adaptation of Chantal Thomas’s novel, a servant—the queen’s reader and sometime confidante, Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydoux)—navigates the quietly mounting atmosphere of confusion, denial and panic among the royal family and their cohort following news of the storming of the Bastille. For the quiet but not timid Sidonie, dogged at all times by Jacquot’s camera, the palace’s seemingly endless hallways all lead to one room—the chamber of Marie Antoinette, to whom she is devoted and by whom she is mesmerized. Diane Kruger plays the monarch in a state of charged vulnerability, having lost her head over the otherwise much-despised Gabrielle De Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen); compared to that thrall, the revolution is as nothing to her. She transfers this frisson to Sidonie. Meanwhile, the aristocrats, sycophants and pretenders ensconced at Versailles read the writing on its walls and begin to take their leave, some donning peasants’ and servants’ clothes before venturing outside the palace in hopes of an inconspicuous exit. Thus, regime change begins at home.
—Judy Bloch
USA/England, 2011, 99 min
In Victorian London, young doctor Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) possesses some vanguard ideas about medical treatment, including the heretical belief that wounds should be thoroughly cleaned rather than treated with leeches. Such notions make it difficult for him to find steady employment, until he meets up with Dr. Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), who is weary from a successful practice devoted to treating women with “hysteria” through manual methods. Eager to please and an apt pupil, Mortimer is welcomed into the Dalrymple household, where the quietly intelligent Emily (Felicity Jones) and the crusading suffragette Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal) present a powerful study in contrasts. While Mortimer aspires to take over the Dalrymple practice and perhaps even become a member of the family, the daily demands of his job prove physically taxing. Fortunately for him, his decadent layabout friend Edmund (a reliably witty Rupert Everett) is about to finally find his calling in the realm of invention. In her third feature film, Tanya Wexler extends her interest in unconventional approaches to genre: This is a historical costume romp and courtroom wig drama, but one with the invention of the vibrator at its center. Aided by Dancy’s and Jones’s charm and Everett’s scene-stealing flair, Hysteria celebrates a moment in medical history devoted to pleasure rather than pain.
—Johnny Ray Huston
France, 2011, 112 min
Move over Jean Dujardin and The Artist: France’s most talked-about performance and film this year comes in the shape of this fuse-lighting comedy that’s become the country’s second-biggest box-office hit of all time with its portrait of friendship across the racial and economic divide. Paralyzed from the neck down after an accident, gloomy millionaire Philippe (François Cluzet, Tell No One) finds little in life worth living for, until the arrival of his new assistant, Driss (Omar Sy), a Senegalese rowdy from the downtrodden banlieues. Not quite on doctor’s orders, Driss takes Philippe as far out of his comfort zone as possible and into a world he never knew existed—or rather always tried to avoid. A slapstick, gleefully incorrect throwback to ’80s culture-clash comedies like Trading Places, only played out across contemporary France’s ever-palpable racial and class tensions, The Intouchables hit a nerve with French audiences, critics hailing it as a cultural milestone and Liberation asking, “Is this the new Amélie?” As Driss, television comedian Sy not only earned rave comparisons to Eddie Murphy but also took home the Best Actor Award at this year’s Césars, beating out none other than The Artist’s Jean Dujardin.
—Jason Sanders
USA, 2012, 85 min
Lola lives in bliss. She has a perfect fiancé—an artist who cooks, is funny, handsome, sweet and great in bed. She has a satisfying job, great friends and a beautiful loft in New York City. However, this so-wonderful-it-is-not situation is about to enter an era of unprecedented tumult and despair. Displaying remarkable range as Lola, indie star Greta Gerwig plays a young woman who, just in time for her 29th birthday, concludes her Saturn return (an astrological phenomenon associated with upheaval, maturation and change). In Lola’s orbit are Henry, Luke and Alice, each played by three equally engaging young actors: Hamish Linklater (The Future, SFIFF 2011), Joel Kinnaman (AMC’s The Killing) and Zoe Lister Jones (Salt). Each at turns provides support and obstacles that Lola must navigate as she restarts her life. Romantic entanglements, adult dating, loneliness and betrayal are all fair game in this funny, dark and emotional journey on which Lola attempts to locate herself. Along the way she meets Nick Oyster, a prison architect with a strange approach to flirting, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach in a wonderfully awkward and oddly hilarious supporting performance. But the film belongs to Gerwig, whose multi-faceted performance points to a breakthrough of astronomical proportions.
—Sean Uyehara
USA, 2012, 85 min
Making the transition from still photography to video, New York artist Martine (Olivia Thirlby) flies to Los Angeles to finish her latest work. Upon the recommendation of a friend, the headstrong young woman takes up residence in a wealthy family’s Silver Lake home to record audio under the guidance of Hollywood sound designer Peter (John Krasinski). Although Martine is focused and determined to finish her piece, her arrival creates tension in the family, as Peter’s wife, Julie (Rosemarie DeWitt), becomes aware of her husband’s lingering glances toward their alluring guest and Martine’s presence causes Julie’s teenage daughter Kolt (India Ennenga) to begin investigating her own influence over the opposite sex. While many films have examined the ways in which the introduction of a stranger changes the dynamics within a family, Ry Russo-Young and cowriter Lena Dunham (writer/director/star of Tiny Furniture) focus their attention on how this change affects the stranger, the catalyst for the various awakenings in the people around her. Aided by strong performances from its three female leads, Nobody Walks is a delicate and sharp character study from two of the most notable female voices in the world of American independent cinema.
—Joe Bowman
England, 2011, 117 min
After Jude (1996), his adaptation of Jude the Obscure, and The Claim (SFIFF 2001), which reimagined The Mayor of Casterbridge as a Western, filmmaker Michael Winterbottom returns enthusiastically once more to Thomas Hardy, transporting Tess of the d’Ubervilles’ tragic romance to modern-day India. Trishna (Freida Pinto) is attracted to her new acquaintance, wealthy English businessman Jay (Riz Ahmed), but when she accepts a job in his Jaipur hotel it is only with the aim of helping her financially strapped family. She flees when emotions grow too intense, but after Jay tracks her down, Trishna agrees to move with him to Mumbai, going against her family’s traditions and setting the stage for disaster. Gorgeously lensed by frequent Winterbottom collaborator Marcel Zyskind and embroidered by Shigeru Umebayashi’s elegant score,Trishna captures both the languorous rhythms of rural life and the hectic tumult of the city. Winterbottom elicits remarkable performances from his leads in a drama that observes the nearly insurmountable obstacles that class division and hidebound tradition create, as well as the havoc that arises out of westerner Jay’s failure to observe that his father’s homeland is another world, one where his and Trishna’s radically different cultures are bound to collide.
—Pam Grady
USA, 2011, 90 min
Booked into a series of increasingly humiliating venues for his author tour, hard-drinking schlock novelist Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer) arrives in Swan Valley. The seemingly bucolic burg is actually a nest of creepiness, with a looming clock tower that never tells the correct time and a population of oddballs, including the voluble local sheriff (Bruce Dern) and a gang of young goths. When a young ghost (Elle Fanning) visits Hall’s dreams and tells him about the disappearance of several girls, the writer sees the germ of a great new story and becomes obsessed with the mystery. As Hall’s obsession deepens, director Francis Ford Coppola amps up the visual style, employing flares of color within black-and-white sequences and even offering a couple of tongue-in-cheek 3-D moments. Kilmer is suitably unhinged as the sozzled scribe, while Fanning is memorably ethereal as the specter with a terrible story to tell. Half a century after Dementia 13 and 20 years after Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Coppola returns to genre filmmaking and gives it his bravura, inimitable stamp. Blackly comic, eerie and suspenseful, with an unmistakable nod to autobiographical circumstances, Twixt is one of Coppola’s most engaging creations.
—Rod Armstrong
England, 2011, 128 min
The Yorkshire moors appear almost primeval in this incarnation of Emily Brontë’s classic 19th-century novel, providing a fitting backdrop to a tale of romantic obsession pared down to its most visceral and elemental form. When brooding, troubled Heathcliff—reimagined as a former slave—enters the Earnshaw household as an adolescent, he forms a bond with Earnshaw daughter Catherine that deepens into wild passion, a relationship made even more unmanageable by issues of class and race and the implacable hatred of Catherine’s brother Hindley. Filmmaker Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank) emphasizes the brutality and feral emotions of Brontë’s tragedy, drawing parallels between the primal nature of the protagonists’ desire and the wilderness that surrounds them. Both pictorially and in the soundscape that replaces the usual musical score, Arnold underlines the meanness of life on the moors, from the bone-chilling rain that so often swamps Heathcliff to the casual cruelty of a hunter snapping a rabbit’s neck or the abuse—physical and emotional—that the characters heap on one another. Almost tactile in its depiction of Heathcliff and Catherine’s world, this adaptation haunts with its vivid evocation of mad love and unavoidable destiny.
—Pam Grady
USA, 2011, 90 min
Lynn Shelton’s last film, Humpday, took what sounded like the premise of a raunchy joke—two straight pals dare each other to star in their own gay porn movie—to explore male relationships and thirty-something anxiety. Now she ups the emotional stakes. Still grief-stricken a year after his brother’s death, Jack (Mark Duplass) travels to a remote cabin on Puget Sound at the suggestion of his best friend, Iris (Emily Blunt), who thinks that he’ll benefit from the isolation. He arrives to find Iris’s sister, Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), recovering from a bad breakup, and they quickly bond over their shared misery. When Iris turns up to surprise Jack, she notes a new connection between him and her sister. What begins as a happy reunion soon deteriorates into a fractious encounter, the trio caroming off one another amid misunderstandings, betrayals and secret affections. Improvising much of the dialogue, the three actors are terrific, imbuing their complex, sometimes maddening characters with genuine heart. Shelton and her cast develop an idea initially conceived by Duplass into a funny, truthful story about sibling bonds, friendship, love and miscommunication.
—Pam Grady
New Directors
USA, 2012, 102 min
This bold debut film by author Stephen Elliott, a visual love letter to San Francisco, is the story of high school student Angelica (a mesmerizing Ashley Hinshaw), whose choices lead her from a depressing home life and dead-end job in Los Angeles to the fetish-filled Bay Area adult film world. A stepfather with dark motives lurks in the background, as Angelica watches over her younger sister and questions her options. In memorable supporting roles are Festival favorite Lili Taylor as Angelica’s manic and opportunistic mother, Jonny Weston as her sexy but sleazy boyfriend and Dev Patel as best friend and much-needed nonsexual support. The vibrant cast also includes James Franco as a coke-addicted attorney who spots Angelica in a strip club, and Heather Graham as a female porn director who launches “Cherry’s” adult film career with mixed feelings. A gritty and defiantly voyeuristic look at the life of a youth who never loses her innocence, even as she gyrates for the camera, Cherry captures a rare point of view, urging us to consider the delicate tension between body and self by focusing on society’s most sought after objects of desire.
—Kim Bender
France/Germany/Belgium, 2011, 91 min
Having told her own riveting story in Persepolis, author and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi explores the life of her great-uncle, revered Iranian musician Nasser Ali Khan, in her latest cinematic effort adapted from her own illustrated novel. Codirected by Vincent Parronaud, this story of lost love, familial tensions and musical genius shimmers with visual riches. Set predominantly in 1958 Tehran, Nasser Ali’s story begins when the unhappily married man runs across his first love, Irane, and she doesn’t recognize him. When he returns home, he finds that his prized violin has been broken. The two events together leave him shattered and he takes to his bed to die. But this situation is only the jumping-off point for Nasser to reflect on his past and future, and for the filmmakers to boldly use varying visual styles to bring his memories and fantasies to life. From vivid Technicolor moments to the light and shadow of German Expressionism to a few moments of animation, Satrapi and Paronnaud use a vast range of techniques to evoke the mind’s manner of heightening the drama of our lives. The directors are also blessed with a dream cast, including Mathieu Amalric (On Tour, SFIFF 2011) as Nasser Ali, Iranian beauty Golshifteh Farahani as the love he pines for and Maria de Medeiros as Nasser’s wife.
—Rod Armstrong
USA, 2012, 85 min
Punctuated by retro gospel tracks and vividly evoking a sense of time and place, filmmaker Adam Leon’s SXSW Grand Jury Award-winning first feature is a sharply observed, wryly funny story of friendship, urban community, burgeoning sexuality and artistic aspiration. Young New York graffiti artists Sofia and Malcolm (newcomers Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson) resolve to one-up a rival gang by tagging the iconic Home Run Apple during a Mets game, an audacious and risky prank attempted by others but never accomplished. A problem quickly emerges, however, when their source will only give them access to the stadium for $500, well beyond the means for the broke duo. Undeterred, Sofia and Malcolm set off to raise the funds by any means necessary, whether through borrowing, bartering, calling in favors, selling pot or even committing robbery. But as the pair find their moneymaking schemes foiled at every turn, it becomes clear that Gimme the Loot is less invested in heist-like hijinks than in observing the memorable and unexpected people, places and situations Sophia and Malcolm encounter during two sweltering New York City summer days.
—Jesse Ataide
USA, 2011, 95 min
Eleven-year-old Woody Watson idolizes his uncle Vincent (Common), who has taken him under his wing since his mother left home in mysterious circumstances. Vincent, a former drug dealer recently released from jail, is trying to establish himself as an entrepreneur and crab-shack restaurant owner. When his bank loan falls through, Vincent is tempted to slide back into street hustling. Trying to figure out a way to get the money he needs, he brings his impressionable nephew along for a ride through the tough streets of Baltimore. As their day spirals into a sequence of odd and increasingly dangerous encounters, Vincent’s resolve to steer clear of criminal behavior and Woody’s faith in his uncle are put to the test. Sheldon Candis’s semi-autobiographical dramatic thriller brings him back to his hometown of Baltimore, where he parses the city’s violent criminal underworld with the help of a star-studded cast that includes Dennis Haysbert, Danny Glover, Charles Dutton and familiar faces from the iconic Baltimore-set HBO series, The Wire. LUV is not only the tale of a boy who struggles to find his identity without his mother but also a heartfelt lesson about self-reliance, pride and survival in one of America’s toughest urban environments.
—Julia Barbosa
USA, 2011, 90 min
In the nearest of futures, one in which technological advancements have added increased convenience but life remains relatively unchanged, cantankerous Frank (Frank Langella), an aging cat-burglar, quietly battles dementia from his rustic home in upstate New York. Aside from occasional calls from his globetrotting daughter (Liv Tyler), and encounters with the local librarian (Susan Sarandon), he remains isolated from the family he pushed away. When his frustrated son (James Marsden) installs a helper robot for Frank, a new chapter begins in the life of the older man as Frank comes to rely on the robot as a friend and confidant. The return of Frank’s wits, however, also brings a desire to pull off another heist—with the help of his trusty companion, of course. Director Jake Schreier’s crowd-pleasing dramatic comedy glides effortlessly between genres with an uncommon sensitivity and remarkable restraint. In his feature debut, Schreier imbues each frame with tenderness, chemistry and humanity. Anchored by a magnetic performance from Langella, who lends commanding gravitas to the proceedings, Robot & Frank is an elegant and heartfelt meditation on the nature of character, memory and trust.
—Landon Zakheim
Documentaries
Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
USA, 2011, 86 min
Diana Vreeland is mostly remembered as a commanding New York high-fashion figure, rip-roaring editor at Harper’s Bazaar, then Vogue, and the one who made the first exhibitions of haute couture happen at the Met. Vreeland fascinates no matter what your take on the world of fashion. You’ll stay riveted on the quick, expressive eyes and ready mouth (all framed by that fringeless bob), the inventive phrases, the pixie shrug conflating fiction and fact. She may well have been the preeminent 20th-century aesthete. “Style is a way of life,” she intones. “We live an artificial life in an artificial town.” Part of her style was to be a consummate professional, an editor who “from the age of 30 worked every day of [her] life.” As a style-spotter, her job was to be at least two weeks into the future at all times, meanwhile carrying her own personal culture inherited from her Belle-Epoque Paris childhood into the intensely scrutinized present. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel meshes archival footage and talking heads, the most talkative of which is Vreeland herself, a transformative presence if ever there was one, and affecting as genius can be.
—Bill Berkson
USA, 2012, 110 min
If “Silence = Death,” as AIDS activists provocatively posited in the early days of the pandemic, this stirring documentary is a clamorous call to life, tracing the street-savvy tactics and enduring legacy of groundbreaking agitprop association ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and its splinter group TAG (Treatment Action Group). Harnessing collective anger at governmental and scientific indifference and Big Pharma greed, a ragtag group of HIV-positive gay men and their supporters coalesced in New York City in 1987, forming ACT UP to demand acknowledgment of the widespread epidemic, more effective and affordable treatment options and patient rights. Pivotal events—a provocative kiss-in; the hopeful introduction of early drug AZT; marches and arrests at FDA and NIH headquarters; disruption of mass at condom-condemning Cardinal O’Connor’s church; fearless confrontations with anti-gay Republican senator Jesse Helms—are recalled in a brilliantly assembled chronology of the organization’s controversial tactics, hard-won triumphs and tragic setbacks. Infighting led some members to form the more suit-and-tied TAG, which hastened clinical studies of the “AIDS cocktail” drug combos that have since made the disease a manageable condition rather than an almost certain death sentence for millions of patients. Comprised of fascinating archival footage and present-day interviews with battle-scarred survivors, including Larry Kramer and Gregg Bordowitz, David France’s sweeping history is unavoidably elegiac but also defiantly joyous.
—Steven Jenkins
USA, 2012, 93 min
Oscar- and Emmy-nominated filmmaker Kirby Dick (This Film Is Not Yet Rated, SFIFF 2006; Twist of Faith) delivers a hard-hitting, emotionally powerful investigative documentary exposing the epidemic of rape within the United States military. Incredibly, twenty percent of all service women have been assaulted. A female soldier in Afghanistan is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. The number of assaults in the last decade alone is believed to be in the hundreds of thousands, and it’s not just women who are victimized. What emerges from the personal stories of multiple rape victims, many of whom are telling their stories for the first time, is a horrifying picture of the rights Americans give up when they choose to serve their country. Interviews with high-ranking officials and members of Congress describe the perfect storm of conditions that make rape in the military so prevalent and contribute to its long-hidden history—an eye-opening depiction that culminates in a forceful call for much-needed change. Winner of the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, The Invisible War urgently confronts the enemy within.
—Kim Bender
Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present
USA, 2011, 105 min
Marina Abramovic has been called ‘the grandmother of performance art’ although she’s as youthful as ever in Matthew Akers’s fascinating, visually crisp documentary portrait, tracking Abramovic’s celebrated 2010 MOMA retrospective. The Serbian-born artist made work in the 1970s concerning the limits and conceptions of the body that have long since become part of the modern art canon, yet she still continues to athletically press at the boundaries of performance art. Granted a yearlong all-access pass, Akers captures Abramovic’s many selves as she stages this major exhibition. The MOMA show, titled “The Artist Is Present” was a marathon spectacle in which Abramovic faced viewers singly, silently gathering ever more fervent groupies along the way. Akers’ camera also captures her posing glamorously for fashion magazines; in guru mode, training young artists to enact her early work; sick in bed using chromatic therapies; domestic while cooking pasta; and emotionally raw while reconnecting with her former art and life partner, Ulay. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present confidently meets built-in challenges, giving the oft-reviled, ephemeral medium of performance a sympathetic, mainstream platform and humanizing a woman who defies age as easily as stereotypes. The documentary befits its subject: it’s a sleek, unerring look in the eye of an extraordinary artist.
—Glen Helfand
USA/Denmark, 2012, 100 min
Employing the deft, insightful eye of director and acclaimed photographer Lauren Greenfield, The Queen of Versailles unspools a simultaneously grand and down-home tale. The film is a character-driven documentary about a billionaire family and their financial challenges in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008. With epic proportions of Shakespearean tragedy, the film follows two unique characters, whose rags-to-riches success stories reveal the innate virtues and flaws of the American Dream. The film begins with the family triumphantly constructing the biggest house in America, a 90,000-square-foot palace. Over the next two years, their sprawling empire, fueled by the real estate bubble and cheap money, falters due to the economic stagnation. Major changes in lifestyle and character ensue within the cross-cultural household of family members and domestic staff. This Sundance Film Festival favorite continuously surprises, enthralls and engages, as its audience gains unique access to a lifestyle few can even dream of, meanwhile seeing a little bit of themselves in every frame.
For complete information, visit the official festival website.
