This year brought 18 features and seven shorts, all presented with live musical accompaniment.
The festival ended with its longest competition title, and it wasn’t even a complete film.
Tender Son is pretentious, Gothic-tinged, and more than a little clunky.
Joe Wilson: Great American, or greatest American?
If Poetry’s emotions are diffuse, Our Life’s are downright incomprehensible.
Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men is, no more and no less, a handsomely mounted French prestige picture.
There isn’t a single moment in Biutiful where one can’t feel the director pulling the strings.
I Wish I Knew is a bit inscrutable, never quite locking down an easy theme or single organizational strategy.
Despair is the dominant mood of Mike Leigh’s Another Year.
A sex-toy Pinocchio? Offenbach’s Olympia as an inflatable courtesan? If only.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps plays a bit like a knowing self-parody of Olive Stone’s typical bombast.
Chongqing Blues is an unwieldy barge of clichés, heavy-handed symbols, and clumsy, inconsistent formal choices.
Robin Hood seems to have been designed with the express purpose of removing from the myth everything that makes it enjoyable.
This isn’t what I expected. A seven-hour layover?
Ever since the festival was announced in April, the general community of film fanatics was set to buzzing.
Fatih Akın is a filmmaker of irrepressible energy.
The film’s quite right in showing the avant-garde as an enormously diverse movement.
The San Francisco International Film Festival is nothing if not facilitative of staunch personalization.
The films and videos shown at Orphans, all shorts or excerpts, don’t always last as long as the talks that precede them.
It really skids off the rails at the midway mark, at which point it sharply shifts its attention to the links between falcon smuggling and Osama bin Laden.
The film doesn’t exactly unearth any new idea or notion about the Rwanda genocide, but it still serves as a well-researched, educational guide.