Piper Samuels

It may be called the Mostly British Film Festival, but the cinematic event features pieces from English speaking countries around the globe, including Ireland, Australia, India, South Africa and New Zealand.

With masterful command over these personal nuances, author Steve Levenson, composers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul and the 2023 touring cast of “Dear Evan Hansen” bring the audience to tears on several occasions.

Predictably unpredictable, the festival’s 95-film lineup comprises names big, small and overall niche. This year, deputy arts editor Dominic Marziali and arts reporters Maida Suta, Emma Murphree and Piper Samuels covered the festival online and in person.

San Francisco’s drizzling atmosphere resembles a wondrous childlike fantasy — a relevant creative vision in the context of director Chris Smith’s new biographical documentary about the late Robert Downey Sr. eponymously named “Sr.”

As is often the case with mainstream remakes, Amazon Studios’ watered-down execution was a painful-in-all-the-wrong-ways snoozefest.

“He’s the perfect naked man,” she described the statue with too much arousal for comfort. “Half tense, half relaxed.”

His documentary “Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off” is an inspirational tear-jerker and a captivating cultural cornucopia that follows Tony Hawk’s journey to success and stardom as a professional skateboarder.

The Kadist Gallery in San Francisco grapples with this duality in its latest exhibit titled “Frequencies of Tradition,” curated by Hyunjin Kim. The multimedia exhibit explores East Asian cultures’ intricate ties to tradition, forwarding the notion of doubly embracing heritage and fighting for social change.

“Bloom” is a multimedia exploration of movement, abstractifying audiences’ understandings of motion with an expert eye for shadow, texture and negative space.

Amoako Boafo’s “Soul of Black Folks” offers a cohesive yet eclectic array of portraits, depicting the history, humanity and whole of the Black figure.