On Film

Two Years at Sea and Phantoms of a Libertine (10.18.12)
“Return to Form: An interview with Jerome Hiler” (Cinema Scope #52 — viewable at the bottom of this page)
“Meditations in an Emergency: the 2012 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar” (Cinema Scope Online)
“Rites of Passage: Three consecutive Sundays of Nathaniel Dorsky’s resplendent films” (6.5.12)
Ben Russell (Cinema Scope #50)
“Light Meter: Picks from San Francisco Cinematheque’s third ‘Crossroads’ festival” (5.15.12)
“How Dark Was My Alley: ‘I Wake Up Dreaming’ returns to the Roxie” (5.8.12)
“Into New Territory: SFIFF” (4.17.12)
“Eternal Return: Three evenings of Gregory Markopoulos’ visionary early films at the Pacific Film Archive” (2.8.2012)
“Zero for Conduct: Contemplating the Filmmaker as Teacher” (12.28.11)
“Direct Address: Chick Strand’s ‘Señora con flores” (1995/2011)’” (12.27.11)
“Let’s Get Lost: Skateboarding doc Dragonslayer coasts to a pretty picture of wasted youth” (11.15.11)
Goldies 2011: Paul Clipson (11.8.11)
“Frame Missing: The unorthodox visions of ‘Not Necessarily Noir’” (11.2.11)
“Light Years: Paying tribute to Jordan Belson’s cosmic cinema” (10.19.11)
“While the City Sleeps” (Commentary on SF Cinematheque program, “Radical Adults Lick God Head Style: New Weird Urbanism and the Rapture of Decay”) (10.12.11)
“Difficult Loves: In praise of Raul Ruiz’s elaborate Mysteries of Lisbon“ (9.21.11)
“Vive Vigo: A new DVD set celebrates Jean Vigo’s evergreen films” (9.14.11)
“Green Dreams: Two documentaries on the lives of garbage pickers” (9.14.11)
“Desolation Angels: PFA surveys the melancholy masterpieces of ’70s American cinema” (8.31.11)
“Pagnol’s Foodie Oeuvre Appreciated in East Bay” (8.11.11)
“Buggin’ Out: Michael Rappaport goes searching for A Tribe Called Quest” (7.15.11)
Terri (Cinema Scope, Issue 47, Summer 2011)
“Border Trouble at the PFA” (6.30.11)
“What Goes Around: Hong Sang-soo disassembles the love triangle in Oki’s Movie“ (6.27.11)
“The Ultimate Cult Movie: Craig Baldwin’s Mock Up on Mu“ (6.23.11)
“Tough, Uncompromising, Nasty Little Films: A Conversation with Elliot Lavine” (6.13.11)
“A Mother’s Touch: Anna Magnani dazzles in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1962 film, Mamma Roma“ (6.1.11)
“Unchained Melodies: Claire Denis, Tindersticks, and the musical muse in cinema” (5.26.11)
“Full Loaded: Crossroads packs a season’s worth of avant-garde cinema into a single weekend” (5.11.11)
“Nothing Was Delivered: Meek’s Cutoff travels the unkind road of Manifest Destiny” (5.5.11)
“Occupational Hazards: Punching in with a few SFIFF films set in the workplace” (4.19.11)
“Swimming in the Deep End of SFIFF 54″ (4.15.11)
“SFMOMA’s Muybridge Experiments with Time, Space” (3.31.11)
“The World Maclaine Made: SF Cinematheque pays tribute to a Beat legend” (3.30.11)
“Jay Rosenblatt talks Darkness“ (3.24.11)
“Fruits of Labor: A new imperfect cinema” (3.23.11)
“YBCA Brings Attention to Embattled Iranian Artists” (3.17.11)
“The Inmost Leaf: An Interview with Nathaniel Dorsky” (Cinema Scope Issue 46, Spring 2011)
“Looking Glass Love: Abbas Kiarostami returns with a surreal take on Tuscan romance” (3.16.11)
“Something Wild: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s shape-shifting Palme d’Or winner arrives” (3.2.11)
“Direct Address, IFFR 2001: Gianfranco Rosi’s El Sicario Room 164 and Ben Russell’s Trypps #7 (Badlands)“ (2.21.11)
“Soderbergh’s Spalding Gray Rings True” (2.17.11)
“Love Comes in Spurts: Talking with Gregg Araki about Kaboom“ (2.16.11)
The Time That Remains (2.4.11)
“Temporary Insanity Take Hold at Noir City 9″ (1.21.11)
“Bye Bye Blackbird: Pedro Costa’s Ne change rien“ (1.19.11)
“Past Imperfect: Digging through the year in archival footage” (12.29.10)

“All Points West: Taking measure of the films of Gary Beydler and Peter Bo Rappmund’s Psychohydrography“ (Cinema Scope, Issue 45, Winter 2011)
“Fight Club: Master documentarian Frederick Wiseman turns to the sweet science” (12.22.10)
“Darkest Heart: Claire Denis’ parable of postcolonial Africa” (11.24.10)
“One Village, Two Movies: Nicolas Philbert’s Return to Normandy“ (11.17.10)
“Side of the Road: Kelly Reichardt visits the PFA for a weekend retrospective” (11.10.10)
Carlos (11.5.10)
Direct Address: Oliver Laxe’s You Are All Captains (Mubi Notebook, 11.1.10)
Berlin & Beyond: In the Shadows and The Robber (10.22.10)
“Wall Street Hold ‘Em: Inside Job indicts the financial sector’s role in the economic crisis” (10.20.10)
“From Here, Cinema: Radical Light surveys a half-century of Bay Area alternative film and video” (10.13.10)
“Practiced Distance: The elements of Paul Clipson’s streaming cinema” (9.29.10)
“False Witness: Talking with Yael Hersonski about her tactful excavation of a Nazi propaganda film” (9.29.10)
“Dreams Untrue: Revisiting Robert Gardner’s polarizing ethnographic films” (9.22.10)
“A Vampire Weekend at YBCA” (8.26.10)
Alamar (7.30.10)
“Bringing Out the Dead: SFJFF Holocaust docs raise important questions about the Holocaust on film” (7.21.10)
“Sicily Unbound: Celebrating Francesco Rosi’s engaged cinema” (7.7.10)
“Nobody But You: Everyone Else thunders with a relationship’s troubled interior” (6.30.10)
“Bucharest Calling: Contextualizing the recent wave of Romanian cinema” (6.8.10)
“Not Fade Away: Tracking those SFIFF films bracketed by returns” (4.21.10)|
“City Limits: A rare screening of Chris Marker’s 1963 Paris portrait, Le joli mai“ (3.31.10)
“Broken Promises: Petition and Promised Lands“ (3.16.10)
“Wild Yonder: Going the distance with Sweetgrass and Let Each One Go Where He May” (3.10.10)
“Siteseeing: San Francisco Cinematheque welcomes James Benning” (2.24.10)
SFIAAFF 2010 Program Notes: The Housemaid
“Playtime: Celebrating Sid Laverents and the amateur cinema clubs” (2.17.10)
“SF Cinematheque Springing Into Action” (2.10.10)
“Scott MacDonald on Art in Cinema at SF MoMA” (2.8.10)
“Enter Night: Chasing fluid chiaroscuro and complicated shadows with Noir City and Val Lewton” (1.20.10)
“Speech Acts: Romania’s cinematic resurgence continues with Police, Adjective“ (1.13.10)
YEAR IN FILM: “Raison Ritual: Paying tribute to the films that paid closest attention” (12.30.09)
“Revisiting Miklos Jancso’s CinemaScope War Ballads” (12.2.09)
“Remembering Chick Strand” (10.23.09)
“Camera Lucida: Robert Beavers’ decades in the making film cycle surfaces at PFA” (10.14.09)
“Pamela Jean Smith brings home movies to the big screen” (10.12.09)
“San Francisco Cinematheque fall program gets underway” (10.3.09)
“Heddy Honigmann and the art of interview” (10.2.09)

“My Country, My Country: Heddy Honigmann returns to Lima with Oblivion“ (9.30.09)
“Come of Age: Pacific Film Archive celebrates 50 years of Ermanno Olmi” (9.23.09)
Liverpool (9.16.09)
Rialto’s Best of British Noir at the Castro (9.9.09)
“The Beautiful Person uncorks the high drama of high school” (9.4.09)
“Variety Lights: PFA mines treasure from UCLA’s Festival of Preservation” (8.5.09)
“Everybody Knows This is Nowhere: Lee Anne Schmitt on California Company Town“ (Cinema Scope #39, Summer ’09)
Interview with Britta Sjogren on Into the Vortex (7.16.09)
“The Deep End: Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel visits YBCA” (7.8.09)
“Domestic Disturbance: Reflecting on Marco Ferreri’s minimalist satire, Dillinger is Dead“ (6.10.09)
“Shadowboxing: Throwing light on underrated action master Phil Karlson at Pacific Film Archive” (6.3.09)
Night and Day (5.22.09)
Summer Hours (5.20.09)
“SFIFF52: In the Realms of the Real” (4.22.09)
The Beaches of Agnes (4.8.09)
Made in U.S.A. (3.31.09)
“Stop Making Sense: Martha Colburn’s Anxious Animations” (Cinema Scope #38, Spring ’09)
“Cat’s Cradle: Ben Rivers’ short films at Other Cinema and SF Cinematheque seek out overgrown paths” (3.25.09)
“Lost Angeles: The Savage Eye finds fear and loathing in the city of angels” (2.17.09)
“Welles Well: A master’s late-career phantoms at the Pacific Film Archive” (1.14.09)
“Don’t Look Back: Movies that saw hard times coming” [Year in Film 2008] (12.31.08)
“Something Wild: Martha Colburn’s Collage Animations” (12.1.08)
“A PFA series traces the long arc of Italian neorealism” (11.26.08)
“Cinemascope Baroque: Lola Montes remains an exquisite treatise on visual pleasure” (11.19.08)
“Full Disclosure: Secrecy investigates executive power and the need-to-know” (10.22.08)
Momma’s Man (10.22.08)
SFFS presents French Cinema Now (10.7.08)
“Speak, Memory: A five-point look at kino21′s five-part war doc series” (9.23.08)
Trouble the Water (9.8.08)
“No Exit: Adapting the dissolute, interior noir of David Goodis” (8.11.08)
My Winnipeg (7.23.08)
“The Exiles on Main Street” (split with Johnny Ray Huston) (7.23.08)
“Diaboliques: Catherine Breillat dishes out a fatal attraction in The Last Mistress” (7.16.08)
“Arghya Basu evokes the mystical and everyday in A Listener’s Tale“ (7.15.08)
“The world of Derek at Frameline” (6.26.08)
“SFFS Screen offers a new Eric Rohmer” (6.25.08)
“Slamdance Elegance: ‘Louder, Faster’ punk performances splatter PFA’s screen” (6.4.08)
Mister Lonely (5.19.08)
“Finding Warren Sonbert” (5.15.08)
“Follow that Balloon: Hou Hsiao-Hsien sails past a French classic towards the sublime” (5.14.08)
“Critic’s Choice: In praise of J. Hoberman and In the City of Sylvia” (4.23.08)
“Bigger Than Life: In praise of the overabundant films of Frank Tashlin” (4.9.08)
Deja Vu Times Two: Last Year at Marienbad continues to bewitch and bewilder” (3.19.08)
SFIAAFF Critic’s Notebook (3.19.08)

“Beautiful Losers: Gus Van Sant soliloquizes the life of a skateboarder in Paranoid Park” (3.12.08)
“Desperately Seeking Cinema: On the many looking glasses of Jennifer Reeves” (3.12.08)
A Genuine Tribute to Peter Bogdanovich (3.6.08)
My Name is Albert Ayler (3.5.08)
2008 Noise Pop Films (2.20.08)
“Maiden Voyage: Director André Téchiné recaptures loves lost in The Witnesses“ (1.30.08)
Noir City 6 preview (1.24.08)
“Bye Bye Beautiful: Let’s Get Lost again – Bruce Weber’s melancholic ode to Chet Baker is restored” (1.16.08)
“Angels with Dirty Faces: Folksy lyricism makes Francisco Vargas’s The Violin a quiet beauty” (1.9.08)
“The Other Side of the Mirror: The year the rock bio-pick swelled with self-awareness” (12.27.07)
Silent Light (12.12.07)
“Talk Talk: Beneath the mumbling lies the roiling core of Hannah Takes the Stairs” (11.28.07)
Goldies Report (11.14.07)
“Seven Up: Picks from the 2007 Vancouver Film Festival” (10.17.07)
“Atmosphere and an Actress: A gliding guide—the double visions and global nightmares of Olivier Assayas” (10.3.07)
In Search of Mozart (9.25.07)
12:08 East of Bucharest (9.11.07)
Review of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Discovering Orson Welles (9.4.07)
“Irina Leimbacher and Konrad Steiner on ‘kino21′”(8.13.07)
“Notes on Nazimova: From Stanivslaski to Hollywood Babylon with a silent-film star” (7.11.07)
“Ball of Fire: In praise of Barbara Stanwyck” (split with Johnny Ray Huston) (7.4.07)
“Night on Earth” (Mala Noche) (6.25.07)
“Sweet and Lowdown: The Timeless Tenderness of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep” (5.16.07)
“The Departed: Heddy Honigmann goes looking for Forever in Paris’s Pere-Lachaise” (4.25.07)
“Cinema Brut: Better than sex, worse than violence: a critical survey of new French extremism at the 50th SF film fest” (4.25.07)
“Seattle’s Finest: On the scene with Police Beat” (4.4.07)

“Innervisions: Two or Three Things Jean-Luc Godard saw in his coffee” (3.28.07)
“Brutal Fucking Movie: An exquisite corpse review of Inland Empire” (with Michelle Devereaux, Cheryl Eddy, and Johnny Ray Huston) (2.7.07)
“Czar of Noir: Eddie Muller paints it black with the Noir City Festival” (1.24.07)

Historical Analysis, Citizen Kane: Camera Movement (2006)
YEAR IN FILM: “New Generation, Old Joy” (12.26.06)
“Embedded: A Q&A with James Longley” (10.31.06)
“Broken Social Scene: Fear and Trembling in Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation“ (9.27.06)
“After the Revolution: In Regular Lovers, it’s 1968 all over again” (4.18.06)
“Native Son: Terrence Malick digs into America’s past with The New World“ (1.18.06)