Selen Ozturk

On Dec. 1, the San Francisco Symphony played the symphony to end all symphonies: Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 9.” The German composer’s widely-regarded masterpiece was preceded by two works new to the SF Symphony: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s one-movement “Ballade,” and Michael Abels’ “Emerge.” 

The script is so lazily written that every minute of the movie is chock-full of unintended laughs by the audience; on the other hand, there were so many laughs to be had that the movie was perversely enjoyable.

"Pearl" is worth seeing because Goth doesn’t stop at that wishful dreaming — as though she would’ve been a well-adjusted girl if only her Ma let her out once in a while. No, Pearl’s desire for more than what she has undoes her.

In its own unmemorable way, the movie spends two hours hammering the same point home: justice without loyalty is hell, which is true enough.

It is embarassing but undeniable that the only erotic things about the film are the volcanoes themselves; it doesn’t help that much footage of the stretching, throbbing, folding and spewing masses is set to French lounge music.

“We Are As Gods” is not one of the better films of this year, but it is one of the most relevant, and it resists the mistakes that many other documentaries commit.

East Bay art galleries are struggling to maintain their spaces and communities, even while enjoying more global online exposure during the pandemic.

Local record stores are enjoying an increase in vinyl interest, despite the precarity of most other businesses during the pandemic.

It’s been a good summer for horror — “X”; “Crimes of the Future”; “Nope”; “Bodies, Bodies, Bodies”; and now, Andrew Semans’ “Resurrection.”

A reflexive, tactile quality characterizes all of Knowles’ work, carrying back to her earliest ventures as an abstract expressionist painter and experimental screen printer in the late ’50s.