Curated by Gary Meyer
Noir City returns to the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, CA from January 15 through January 25, 2026 with a grand line-up of film sharing a musical theme. We bring you a gallery of posters, stills, and trailers from the festival for the first half of the Festival.
Anticipating This Year’s Music-Themed Fest With Delight
by Meredith Brody. (January 13,2026)
I love Eddie Muller’s Noir City film festivals; I don’t think I’ve missed a one since his first edition in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque in 1999, four years before SF’s first Noir City.
I start out perusing the list of 24 films (paired in a dozen double bills) in my usual somewhat-blinkered and mildly narcissistic fashion: which ones are new to me? Since I’ve been seeking out film noir since before I went to college, and my first post-college publication in book form was in Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward’s first “Encyclopedia of Film Noir” back in 1979, it’s not totally a surprise that there are only two that qualify: the British Face the Music aka The Deadly Glove (1954), and The Crimson Canary (1945), neither of which I’ve even heard of.
By Noma Faingold (August 13, 2025)
Diane Ross will be appearing at San Francisco’s Stern Grove on Sunday, August 17, 2025 in a free afternoon concert. While sold out, 1000 tickets will be given away Friday at 5pm. See bottom of this article for details.
The family hi-fi set-up, anchored by two giant hidden speakers, was located in the dining room. We never ate there unless we had company. No one who came to the house knew where the speakers were because the beige tweed fabric covering them matched the adjacent drapes.
The first Diana Ross album I bought was simply titled, “Diana Ross.” The 1970 release was her debut solo record. I was in second grade and my musical taste was already firmly established. I gravitated to the slick soul of Motown – artists like The Jackson 5, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder and especially Ross, as opposed to popular hardcore rock bands of the time, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin.
An interview with Film Director Bess Kargman
By Noma Faingold
(July 18, 2024)
Director Bess Kargman knew going in that prolific songwriter Diane Warren, the subject of her latest documentary, doesn’t fully trust anybody. “It’s not in her nature,” Kargman said. “The biggest challenge was earning her trust. I had to navigate when to push her. She would get really anxious sitting in a chair too long and being away from her work.”
Diane Warren: Relentless screens on August 3, at 3:30 p.m., at the Piedmont Theatre, (4186 Piedmont Ave., Oakland) during the 44th Annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, July 18-August 4. Complete Festival Information and tickets.
By Nancy Friedman
(April 24, 2023)
How many times has Richard Marriott seen Pandora’s Box? When I suggested 50, he said that number was conservative. “Probably double that,” he guessed.
By Meredith Brody
(November 5, 2022)
San Francisco is lucky to have Donald Malcolm’s French Noir Series, “The French Had a Name for It” at the Roxie.
The upcoming festival programs 15 films over four days at the Little Roxie, and once again I will be there for all of it. It unspools on Sunday November 6 and Monday November 7, and the following on Saturday November 12 and Sunday November 13.
By Gaetano Kazuo Maida
October 16, 2022
“The drum is like a heartbeat.” —John Santos
I grew up in the Bronx in the ‘50s. This was in an old Italian neighborhood, full of grape arbors and fig trees (even a goat!), but by the time I was eight our neighbors on one side and across the street were from Puerto Rico, and on the other side were African Americans; it’s mostly Caribbean now. My public school was a ten block walk from home and most of my classmates there were Jewish. My parents were a mixed couple (Japanese/Sicilian) and most of their friends were mixed in one way or another as well, so I had a strong sense of a wonderfully polyglot community that ill-prepared me for the rather homogeneous and affluent population of my elite public high school. But it did open my ears to a wide variety of music. The soundtrack at home was folk, blues, soul (long story), flamenco, and opera, but in the streets it was doo-wop and Afro-Caribbean.
A Review by Gaetano Kazuo Maida
July 1, 2022
They had me at “Leonard Cohen.”
Ever since Judy Collins introduced his song “Suzanne” on her great 1968 album, In My Life, his name on a project—book, album, song, film—had special meaning, somehow within and yet beyond pop culture. Here, it’s perhaps his best-known, and certainly most covered song, “Hallelujah” that takes the lead, and offers a lens through which to survey his life, the music business, and the cultural era he inhabited and inspired.
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By Gary Meyer
May 26, 2022 (updated May 29)
Most of us see in 3D. We can look around, above, and below. We take it for granted and it is generally not a thrill ride.
But offer us a pair of 3D glasses, a VR rig or some kind of created immersive environment to take us to places we have not been, other worlds or to be in the middle of action scenes and many of us are willing to pay a premium for the enhanced experience—at least once. And then the novelty wears off and we go back to traditional ways of viewing.
Vicki Bennett looks at us
By Brian Darr
May 19, 2022
In 2014 John Davis produced a double-album entitled Gravity Spells: Bay Area New Music and Expanded Cinema Art, which presented sound recordings made by himself as well as Maggi Payne, Tashi Wada, Ashley Beloun and Ben Bracken, paired with accompanying DVDs featuring work by local moving image artists Lawrence Jordan, Craig Baldwin, Paul Clipson and Kerry Laitala. The release was accompanied by four weekend performances at the Kala Art institute in Berkeley, and the discs quickly sold out.
Now nearly eight years later there’s a sequel release, Gravity Spells II involving an entirely new slate of Bay Area sound artists and filmmakers. This time around the performances celebrating the release will all be held May 19-22 at venerable Mission District venue The Lab. Only the artists know quite what to expect, but they’re sure to present a unique live cinema experiences.
Part Two- What I Will Be Seeing
By Meredith Brody
May 4, 2022
I learned my lesson early with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival: GO TO EVERYTHING.
The first year I attended, I cherry-picked only the movies I hadn’t seen before. The ones I went to were such a revelation – both in the presentation and the group experience – that my heart hurt as I walked away. What a MAROON I was. Even a movie I thought I knew well would be a fresh experience, featuring as it did not only live music, but one of the world’s great audiences. There’s a kind of euphoria that sets in when you commit to seeing everything on offer.
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