At the San Francisco International Film Festival on Wednesday, writer-director Richard Linklater and actress-writer Julie Delpy took the stage at the Sundance Kabuki to discuss their film “Before Sunrise” and its sequel “Before Sunset.”
Three of the best films at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival–“Something in the Air,” “Before Midnight” and “Stories We Tell” –are as much about their direct subject matter as the nature of storytelling itself: how our own personal mythologies shape our experiences and mold or corrupt our memories.
The 56th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), which runs from April 25 to May 9, mainly in Japantown at the Sundance Kabuki and New People Cinema, is already shaping up to be a very exciting couple of weeks. The festival plays host to 151 films from 51 countries and in 31 different languages. One of the great pleasures of attending SFIFF is getting to see these films the way they were meant to be seen–on a big screen, in digital projection–since many won’t get a wide release, and those that do may play only briefly at smaller cinemas like the Embarcadero Cinema or Opera Plaza Cinemas, as well as sample films from all over the world all in one day.
Netflix can be tough to sift through; although it is full of fantastic lesser-known films, there are many terrible films in the library to pad the numbers. Here is a list of five fantastic documentaries, available on Netflix now, that should not be missed.
The great jazz saxophonist Chris Potter brought his newest project as a bandleader, the Chris Potter Quartet, to Yoshi’s Oakland last Sunday for a fantastic show. Since his career began 20 years ago, Potter has distinguished himself as one of the very best and most virtuosic saxophonists on the scene, equally comfortable as a sideman for bassist Dave Holland in his progressive Dave Holland Quintet as with the more traditional pianist McCoy Tyner at Herbst Theatre in 2011. He’s amassed an impressive resume as a sideman with much of the who’s who of jazz today, including recently with the new Axis Quartet with Joshua Redman.
“Warm Bodies” is the latest, and emotionally, the best film in the recent trend, starting with “Shaun of the Dead,” to revive the zombie film for comedic and even rom-com effect. “Zombieland” is its closest predecessor, a film more interested in the eccentricities of the humans battling the zombies–including a couple of kick-ass sisters who excel at scheming–than the zombie battles themselves.
In a year where the biggest blockbusters account for both the best (“Skyfall, “Hunger Games”) and worst (“Cloud Atlas”) films of the year, here is Intermission’s list of the best films of 2012, in which art house movies held their own against box office hits.
Sophocles’ “Elektra” is, in many ways, the older sister of “Hamlet”: a woman named Elektra (Rene Augesen) whose father, the king, was killed by her mother Clytemnestra (Carol Lagerfelt), and her mother’s lover, is so destroyed by her father’s death that she is in a constant state of lament and eventually seeks vengeance.