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“Keith” is nearly four feet by three feet in dimension, a black and white portrait print. The mouth seems almost faded, a rectangle of blanching discernible amid the gray monochrome of the face. He is unsmiling, and his eyes look at something in the distance, the reflection off the top
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A fast-food restaurant, with greasy grills and artery-clogging fare, seems an unlikely setting for a thriller. But for “Compliance,” the newest film from Magnolia Pictures, fast-food is of little concern. Screenings of “Compliance” have driven audience members from theaters in droves. At the San Francisco screening alone, several viewers left the
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There’s something automatically intriguing about a production of “The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare’s most controversial play. Yes, even for San Francisco. Though the city rarely shies away from addressing contentious subjects, something about “Merchant” raises brows. San Francisco is progressive, certainly, but progressive stops where political correctness begins. Fortunately for
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“Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” doesn’t stop to find out whether we’ve had our fill. The feature shouts “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” and plunges headfirst into showing us the inhabitants of a few towns — if the world is ending for everyone, our self-absorption certainly isn’t aware of it — running around like Chicken Littles with their heads cut off.
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The music video for “Youth Without Youth,” the first single off Synthetica, is three minutes and 49 seconds of Canadian indie rock band Metric acting appropriately aloof. They make a pretty good show of looking badass while doing some innocuous things – building a many-tiered cake, stacking a pile of
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Time travel can go horribly, frightfully wrong. The merest alteration in the fabric of time could result in catastrophic results. Riskier than time travel is the time travel movie. With classics like “Back to the Future”, “Terminator” and “Donnie Darko” figuring prominently in the American canon, time travel pictures have
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The second of this year’s Snow White-themed releases, “Snow White and the Huntsman,” is a far cry from March’s “Mirror Mirror,” a happy family comedy. “Snow White and the Huntsman” is a decidedly darker, aesthetically richer and more thrilling retelling of the classic tale. Or at least, so it was
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When Regina Spektor composes lyrics, she doesn’t write them down. This can be a problem; lyrics slip through the cracks of memory like change between couch cushions. What she does manage to get down into a song, however, tends to be memorable, a sweet bit of candy for the ears.
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The summer feel-good film need not be riddled with bombast or inundated with rarely refreshing movie cliches. Wes Anderson’s newest film, “Moonrise Kingdom,” is a welcome departure from productions that aim to entertain the lowest common denominator. It is a fresh Rhode Island breeze that braces rather than buffets the
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American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco is paying homage to modernist master Samuel Beckett. In a single bill, the A.C.T. has joined “Play,” one of Beckett’s rarely performed one-acts, with “Endgame,” Beckett’s 1957 work written in the absurdist style. “Play” is Beckett’s illustration of a love triangle, drawn using minimal
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