Opening weekend of the San Francisco International Film Festival featured a wide range of documentaries, from the delightful and impressive Iris to the educational if somewhat disappointing Best of Enemies. Here’s a look at these two films. Iris **** Master documentarian Albert Maysle’s final film is an introduction to the lively, fashionable, and fabulous 93-year-old New York […]
Film Reviews
Here you will find every film review we've written. These include: festival films, new releases, and older films.
Ex Machina is yet another film about boys and their toys
Ex Machina isn’t just misogynistic; it gets the science wrong, too.
Effie Gray a feminist not-quite fairy tale
In Effie Gray, John Ruskin wanted to marry a child; he was disappointed when he found himself face-to-face with a grown woman, with sexual needs, agency, and feelings. It’s an interesting reversal. We expect to watch Effie be exploited, but the problem is that she’s a woman and not that she’s an ingenue.
Review: In ’71, a British soldier is lost in IRA territory
Yann Demange’s debut film, ’71, is a tense thriller set over the course of one fateful night for a British soldier lost in IRA territory at the height of The Troubles. It features a fantastic central performance from Jack O’Connell. Read our interview with director Yann Demange here. Yann Demange’s tense film, ’71, is a thriller […]
Seymour: An Introduction: A moving portrait of the artist as a humble teacher
In Seymour: An Introduction, Ethan Hawke follows his friend. former concert pianist Seymour Bernstein, for an intimate, inside look at the process of making art, its rewards and struggles, and an ode to a great teacher.
Merchants of Doubt: an inside look at the climate change denial industry that doesn’t delve deep enough
Merchants of Doubt takes an in-depth look at how the same public relations experts — these “Merchants of Doubt” — who helped tobacco companies persuade the world, in the 1950s and 1960s, that cigarettes weren’t harmful to health, even though the tobacco companies had done their own very good scientific studies that proved the opposite, were […]