Film

Cinema might have progressed beyond burying its gays but that doesn’t mean it can’t assign them a fate worse than death – lifelong pining. This is so prevalent in culture that it has its own term: queer yearning, an achey, all-consuming desire in which years of repression spill forth into a crush so forbidden, so unquenchable, that the only way to relieve its pains is by penetrating a peach.Hurtling into this lineage is the Macedonian-Australian film-maker Goran Stolevski’s Of an Age, a pinwheeling, decade-spanning odyssey of teenage kicks and their prolonged aftershocks. And I mean hurtling: from the off, Stolevski’s direction possesses the […]

It’s the 25th anniversary of the San Francisco Independent Film Festival (SF IndieFest) and it takes place February 2-12, 2023. This year’s festival includes 62 shorts and 35 features from 14 countries. There are 34 films that are local to the Bay Area.  “While the city might have changed over the last 25 years, SF IndieFest’s mission and curation hasn’t,” says Festival Director Jeff Ross. “We still seek the new and unusual to present to San Francisco film fans.”  For 25 years, the mission of the San Francisco Independent Film Festival has been to seek out new film discoveries for Bay Area film fans to enjoy. Now, with the […]

The 15th Mostly British Film Festival runs February 9-16 with something for every moviegoer’s taste.The annual tribute to English language foreign films opens with the Northern California premiere of EMILY, a romanticized and sensual perspective on the life of Wuthering Heights author Emily Bronte. Opening night features actress-turned-director Frances O’Connor on Zoom discussing her rapturously-reviewed debut film. In this Sunday’s Pink, Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle named EMILY first in his list of “Movies to Look Out for in 2023.” The festival closes with ALL THAT BREATHES. This poignant story of brothers who run a bird hospital in New Delhi […]

BLUE CAFTAN (France/Morocco/Belgium/Denmark, narrative feature, dir. Maryam Touzani) Set at a bespoke dress shop in Morocco, this unusual love-triangle tale avoids heated melodrama, instead exploring the lives of its three main characters with intimacy and great tenderness. Expert performances and a stirring resolution reveal the complexities and profundities of enduring love. In Arabic with English subtitles – California Premiere BODY PARTS (US, documentary feature, dir. Kristy Guevara-Flanagan) Hollywood stars and relative unknowns alike share their experiences shooting sex scenes for TV and movies in this wide-ranging primer on the perils of being female in Hollywood. Deftly intercut among the interviews, including with Alexandra Billings, […]

VICTIM Friday, Sept. 23, 2022 –7 p.m. & Sunday, Sept. 25, 2022 – 4 p.m. “‘I wanted him!’ With these words Dirk Bogarde consigned his matinee idol alter-ego to history, and a gripping landmark in gay cinema was born. Bogarde’s closeted, married lawyer Melville Farr is drawn into exposing a terrifying blackmail ring when an admirer (Peter McEnery) commits suicide rather than implicate him. Supporting the recommendations of the Wolfenden Committee, director Basil Dearden, producer Michael Relph and screenwriter Janet Green denounced the poisonous, institutionalized homophobia gay men of all classes faced, and cleverly packaged the politics within an accessible crime-thriller. VICTIM, and […]

The new David Bowie documentary, Moonage Daydream, succeeds not only for what it is, but what it isn’t. That has a lot to do with the clichés — and, occasionally, limitations — of the well-trodden format of the music documentary. We know bad ones — or just boilerplate ones — when we see them. They typically open in medias res; the subject mumbles something backstage through celluloid grain and a plume of smoke. Here come the talking heads: Jakob Dylan, Dave Grohl, Bono. The director takes us from the cradle to the grave — and you’re left a few bucks poorer, wondering if this is all […]

OUTwatch, Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival and Rialto Cinemas are all co-sponsoring Loving Highsmith Based on Patricia Highsmith’s personal writings and accounts of her family and lovers, the film casts new light on the famous thriller writer’s life and work, permeated by themes of love and its defining influence on identity. The Price of Salt (the first Lesbian novel which broke with convention by depicting a lesbian relationship that ended with the promise of fulfillment, not moral condemnation, misery or death), Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and the Talented Mr. Ripley were all written by Highsmith.“It focuses extensively on Highsmith’s sexuality and relationships with women, […]

The Italian Cultural Institute, Cinema Italia San Francisco In collaboration with Artistic Soul Association under the auspices of the Consul General of Italy in San  FranciscoPresent PASOLINI 100: Homage to Pier Paolo Pasolini On the 100 year anniversary of his birth Saturday, September 10, at the Castro Theatre 429 Castro Street San Francisco, CA This Special Homage to Pasolini, who pushed the boundaries of politics, art and sexuality, follows the complete retrospective that Cinecittà premiered at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles on the occasion of the 100th Anniversary of Pasolini’s birth. San Francisco will pay homage […]