Comfort for the Anglophiles – Well, Everybody, Actually: The Mostly British Festival 2025

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by Meredith Brody                                                    (February 4, 2025)

We cinephiles contain multitudes. Luckily, the SF Bay Area continues to cater to its diverse audiences with a number of well-curated film festivals. One of my favorites has always been the annual Mostly British Film Festival, which colonizes (haha) the Vogue Theater for 8 days in February. Mostly British includes films from the UK, Ireland, Australia, India, South Africa, and New Zealand. Catnip for not only the Acorn and Britbox addicts, but for Anglophiles and others. Continue reading →

Music Hath Charms

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San Francisco’s A Day of Silents Features a Stellar Lineup of Musicians and Films on Sunday, February 2, 2025.

by Meredith Brody.                                                         (January 28,2025)

The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Photo by Pamela Gentile.

You’ve all heard that silent movies really weren’t SILENT: they all had live musical accompaniment, ranging from a solitary guy at an upright piano or a mighty Wurlitzer to up-to-110-member symphonic orchestras. When Carmine Coppola was about to go on tour in 1981 to conduct his new score for his son Francis Ford Coppola’s restoration of Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoleon, he reminisced about the silent movie palaces of his youth: “”When I was really young,” Mr. Coppola recalled, ”I would go to Broadway to see a movie. I remember  The Thief of Bagdad, with Douglas Fairbanks; he always insisted on an original score. Those theaters – the Strand, the Rialto, the Rivoli, the Capitol – had 40-or 50-piece orchestras. It was so beautiful. I saw the Big Parade that way and What Price Glory and The Three Musketeers. ”

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Noir City 22’s Wicked Women Thrills

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(January 15, 2025)

“Where Winsome Women Turn Wicked!” is the theme of this year’s Noir City featuring 24 gritty thrillers in the best possible prints, in 35mm when available. All double bills—two movies for the price of one,  “I think it’s important to make note of the problematic content and say things like, ‘Well, yes, the women had to be punished at the end of these movies,’ ” TCM host Alicia Malone told G. Allen Johnson for his excellent SF Chronicle article on the Festival. “But that also doesn’t negate the fact that for most of the film, you get to watch a powerful woman wielding her sexuality, using it as a weapon and drawing in these hapless men and getting to play, for these actresses, unlikable, complex characters. Women were front and center and very important in noir. And even though there was a lot of misogyny, a lot of face slapping and forced kissing, it also really gave them a chance to play these complex characters at a time when women didn’t have power.”

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SECRETS FROM THE MOVIE SET

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An Interview with Producer Paul Zaentz

By Gary Meyer

(updated November 21, 2024)

34 Oscar nominations.

22 Wins including 3 Best Pictures.

That is only a fraction of the awards the Bay Area ‘s Saul Zaentz won for the terrific movies he brought to the international big screen.

The Berkeley FILM Foundation and the California Film Institute presented the Saul Zaentz Film Celebration, an event honoring the legacy of the legendary independent film producer, November 15-17, 2024, at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, California.

Amadeus shows at Davies Hall with the SF Symphony the score live on  music. on Nov. 29-30, 2024. Tickets and info here.

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155 RARE FRENCH NOIRS CAN’T BE WRONG

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By Owen Field

THE sheer monumentality of Don Malcolm’s THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT “festival of the lost continent” has been difficult to grasp over its ten-year run. It resembles a whale obscured in a misty ocean—in this case, a mist-enshrouded history with some surprising historical suppressions.

Jean Gabin and Brigette Bardot in LOVE IS MY PROFESSION / EN CAS DE MALHEUR

Its singular insistence on a radically revised paradigm for the history of film noir is a bridge too far for those all too comfortable with either the “American exceptionalist” origin theories or the nebulous “darkness has no borders” mantra that steadfastly sidesteps Malcolm’s central insight.

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LIVE CINEMA by Pamela Gentile

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Live Cinema is the contemporary revival of experiential cinema with a live element.
Celebrating her fortieth year shooting major film festivals in San Francisco and beyond, Gentile shares her love of world cinema, her capture of silver screens with live musical accompaniment that exemplifies and preserves the inimitable cinematic theater experience.

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