IOHTE: Maureen Russell

"IOHTE" stands for "I Only Have Two Eyes"; it's my annual survey of selected San Francisco Bay Area cinephiles' favorite in-the-cinema screenings of classic films and archival oddities from the past year. An index of participants can be found here.

Contributor Maureen Russell is a cinephile and Noir City film festival volunteer.

There is a lot of noir on my list for 2014.

Screen capture from Strand DVD of Victims Of Sin

1) Noir City 12– The Castro Theatre, Jan. 24 – Feb. 2
The theme of international noir brought rarities and classics from around the globe. Seeing French alongside American, British, rare Argentinian and European selections provided great context, as filmmakers adapted what others were doing and made their own mark. Highlights include the Kurosawa directing Toshiro Mifune double feature Stray Dog (1949) with Drunken Angel (1948) and the wildly fun Mexican musical noir Victims of Sin / Victimas del Pecado (1951) with great music and dance numbers.

2) SF Silent Film Fest
Highlights: the creative Russian film The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, USSR (1924). Musical Accompaniment by the Matti Bye Ensemble

Underground, UK (1928). Directed by Anthony Asquith, Musical Accompaniment by multi-instrumentalist Stephen Horne. This love triad turns dark, set in working class London with beautiful cinematography.   

Also Dragnet Girl, Japan (1933). Directed by Yasujiro Ozu, Musical Accompaniment by Guenter Buchwald

3) The French Had a Name for It / French Film Noir 1946-64 San Francisco's Roxie Theatre from November 14-17
Great festival with many sold-out screenings. My favorite was Witness in the City (Un Temoin Dans La Ville) (1959) for its story, characters, tension, location shooting and chase scenes through the streets of Paris, and beautiful cinematography.

4) A Hard Day’s Night (1964) New 4K restoration for the 50th Anniversary – The Castro Theatre
A double bill with Richard Lester’s next film, The Knack…and how to get it (’65). Seeing the beautiful restoration, I wasn’t sure if I’d even seen this on the big screen. The audience seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the Fab 4 as much as I was. The Knack is a farce set in Swinging London.

5) Marketa Lazarova (1967) – the Roxie 7/14 – new 35mm print Czechoslovakia I hadn’t heard of this classic Czech film before. Medieval setting shot using inventive technique.

6) Double feature at I Wake Up Dreaming noir festival, 5/25 – The Roxie
Brainstorm. Directed by William Conrad. (1965)
The Couch. Directed by Owen Crump. (1962)

Screen capture from Warner DVD

7) The Unknown (Director Tod Browning, 1927, USA, with Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford)
SFIFF – The Castro 5/6/14 – Silent film with live accompaniment by Stephin Merritt 
Shown with Guy Maddin's short Sissy Boy Slap Party (1995) 
I’d seen this film before: great characters, visuals and acting, with darkness and humor that Chaney and Browning can give. 

8) Inland Empire (2006) 
The Roxie 7/22 
David Lynch’s own 35mm print screened. I had never seen this and was waiting to watch it on the big screen. 

Screen capture from Celestial DVD

9) King Boxer (Five Fingers of Death) – Hong Kong, 1972
CAAM Fest – Great Star Theater 3/14/14 – Run Run Shaw Tribute
Released in the USA by Warner Bros. in March 1973, the film was responsible for beginning the North American kung fu film craze of the 1970s.

10) Burroughs at 100: The Films of William S Burroughs
February 3, 2014. City Lights Bookstore, with commentary by Mindaugis Bagdon.
A screening of the William S Burrough's films Towers Open Fire, The Cut-Ups, and Bill and Tony. (early 60s). It was great to be able to see entire short films using the cut-up technique, even if at least one film tested your patience.

The Unknown (1927)

 A scene from Tod Browning's THE UNKNOWN, which will screen with live musical accompaniment by Stephin Merritt at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8. Courtesy of San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Tod Browning directed, and Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford star in this film.

WHAT: Eventually every film lover who digs deep enough into the most remarkable and unusual treasures of film history comes across The Unknown, a circus-set tale of obsession, blackmail, and revenge. It's best if he or she knows as little as possible about the plot specifics before watching it for the first time however. But I don't think it's a spoiler, or a risk of overselling it, to say that it contains Lon Chaney's most remarkable physical and emotional performance, and that I consider it one of the great cinematic works of the late 1920s, too-often unfairly relegated to sideshow status to the kinds of films that were considered for Academy Awards and/or received frequent citations in film history books. The Unknown barely even rated a mention in the 1957 Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces, in part because that film was made at Universal, which saw Chaney's Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame as far overshadowing the films he made with Tod Browning and others at MGM, and in part I suspect because its subject matter was still considered too hot to handle even in the waning years of the Motion Picture Production Code. That's all fine, as it helps The Unknown feel less like an old "warhorse" and more like a gem waiting to be discovered, even today.

If you do want to read more about the film, Sean McCourt wrote an article for this very blog about the last time it screened in the Bay Area almost six years ago.

WHERE/WHEN: 8PM tonight only at the Castro Theatre, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: I'm not going to earn any "cool points" from certain purists by admitting this, but I've attended just about every live music/silent film event the San Francisco Film Society has put on in the past fourteen years, and I regret attending none of them. Last year I was quoted in an article discussing the history of these screenings, and I'm afraid I came off as a little more curmudgeonly than I really feel. It's true that some of these events (Mountain Goats and Sir Arne's Treasure; Black Francis's The Golem) are really just music concerts with a 35mm print running overhead a band playing the kinds of songs it usually does, with little attempt to connect musical and film content beyond providing inspiration for the setlist. But I can certainly enjoy that kind of experience even if I don't necessarily consider what's happening "accompaniment" or a "score". Increasingly I'm just thankful to get to see silent films in 35mm, no matter what the sound in the venue is like.

These are unique events in that you really don't know what you're going to get when you walk into them. I had no idea what to expect last Tuesday when I went to see Thao Nguyen and her band the Get Down Stay Down, one of the few instances in which the SFIFF has presented one of these events with a band I was not already something of a fan of. I sat next to my friend Dakin Hardwick, who was covering the event for the Spinning Platters website, and has written an excellent summary of the event from the perspective of a Thao fan who'd never seen a Charlie Chaplin film before. A few seats away on my other side was silent film aficionado Lincoln Specter, a film-blogging colleague whose account I agree with almost completely, although I'd note that the low-budget classic The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra is as much influenced by Soviet film trends as German ones. I found the evening tremendously entertaining, and it was great to see The Pawnshop and several short newsreels from the National Film Preservation Foundation's haul of treasures recently repatriated from New Zealand (as well as 9413), in 35mm prints. 

Neither Dakin nor Lincoln really commented on the thematic unity of all the mixed-and-matched films and videos from various moviemaking eras, which only truly became apparent in the final of three short videos directed by Lauren Tabak and starring Nguyen, which made joking reference  to one of the Hearst Movietone clips screened earlier in the program. Nguyen is clearly aware of the historical demands of show business, in which women have found themselves offered as a commodity for audience consumption; performing on a stage built for nubile dancers to provide pre-film spectacle back in 1922 was a way to reclaim female power out of such a situation.

What Nguyen and company did was, again, not what I'd call a "score" for any of the films shown, but it was totally of a piece, and worked well as an evening's entertainment. Arguably better than some prior attempts by SFIFF-selected bands to compose or adapt music for a true film accompaniment. I thought last year's Waxworks score by Mike Patton, Matthias Bossi, Scott Amerndola and William Winant was possibly the most successfully realized of these attempts, but I know there are those who disagree with me even placing it in this category. Others, like Jonathan Richman's The Phantom Carriage and Stephin Merritt's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea were, for me, largely admirable attempts that suffered a few too serious problems to truly succeed. As the latter ended, I tweeted that I "overall enjoyed the audaciousness of it all. Applied to an inarguable non-masterpiece, it doesn't fell like a wasted opportunity." I hope that Merritt learned a few lessons from that night, since he's being brought back tonight to provide the music for The Unknown, and is expected to tackle a third silent sometime down the road.

Anyway, if it doesn't work out, the professional silent film accompanists will arrive in full force (minus any organists, sadly) for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival which comes sooner than usual this year. It runs May 29 through June 1, in a cost-cutting attempt to take advantage of cheaper air and hotel rates for festival guests than traditionally found in July. There's only three feature films in this year's program I've seen in full before, the lowest such tally in many a year. All three are well worth watching, even if they're not their director's respective masterpieces: Carl Dreyer's The Parson's Widow, Yasujiro Ozu's Dragnet Girl and Buster Keaton's The Navigator. Of the others, I've long been wanting to see 35mm prints of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Underground, and The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, and am crossing my fingers these titles screen that way. Most of the others I've never or barely heard of at all, and am excited just to experience however I can, but especially on the Castro screen with top-class accompaniment.

If you can't wait that long, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum hosts silent 16mm screenings with live musicians every Saturday and have just announced their line-ups for May and June, including their weekend-long Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival which includes showings of proven classic titles like The Big Parade, Gertie the Dinosaur and The Circus as well as many lesser-known films.

HOW: The Unknown will screen in a rare 35mm print, with live accompaniment by Stephin Merritt. It will be preceded by a Guy Maddin short film Sissy Boy Slap Party, the soundtrack for which Merritt and accordionist Daniel Handler hope to whip the audience into a frenzy of participation.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 13 hosts the last scheduled screening of Tangerines, a Georgian (as in former Soviet Republic of) film that I've heard nothing but praise about from festgoers who've had a chance to see it already. Among other options there's also Charlie McDowell's The One I Love, one of three programs happening over the next couple days that were added to the festival schedule after the program books went to press, as noted on Gary Meyer's new EatDrinkFilms website.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The New Parkway in Oakland holds a special screening of a 2008 documentary called Children of the Amazon at 7:00 with the director present tonight.

Cosmic Flower Unfolding (2013)

A scene from Benjamin Ridgeway's COSMIC FLOWER UNFOLDING, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Benjamin Ridgeway created this work.

WHAT: There's long been a connection between San Francisco's experimental film scene and the concentration of interest in non-traditional and/or non-Western spirituality. In particular, Asian mystical and religious ideas have informed the work particularly of the Bay Area's legendary experimental animators, such as Harry Smith, Jordan Belson and Lawrence Jordan. Cosmic Flower Unfolding proves the durability of this confluence into the digital animation era. Ridgeway, a local university professor and video game animator, describes in a brief interview on the San Francisco International Film Festival's blog that he first visualized this very short (2-minute) work while meditating, and uses the Sanskrit term "mandala" to describe some of the neon forms he arranges and has pulsate throughout the piece, until they make the form of sage-like face. Ridgeway was influenced by the illustrations of nineteenth-century biologist Ernst Haeckel, but I was also reminded of snowflake geometries. Perhaps there's a mystic out there who'd argue that flowers, undersea creatures, ice crystals, and constellations of electronic data all are essentially the same thing in the scheme of things.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a program starting 9PM tonight only at the Kabuki, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: If you have trouble accepting animation as anything other than cartoons for kids (by which I could mean either children or stoned college students) then you may have trouble with the SFIFF's Shorts 3 program, but if you are open to the breadth of how the medium can be applied in intellectually and sensorially stimulating ways, you'll likely find it to be a very worthwhile program. Ranging from exercises in eye-popping, near-complete abstraction such as Cosmic Flower Unfolding and two pieces by Max Hattler, to Subconscious Password, a piece of semi-autobiographical satire from Canada's Chris Landreth (who made the Academy Award-winning Ryan), this set of 11 shorts proves there are still a heck of a lot of ways to get your mind blown without taking drugs. 

Frequent SFIFF contributors Bill Plympton and Kelly Sears take their respective animating styles into extreme territories at polar opposite ends of the "cartoony or not" spectrum and both far, far from Pixar and its middle-of-the-road imitators. I was delighted to recognize Guilherme Marcondes's The Master's Voice: Caveirao as a worthy follow-up to the Brazilian-born animator's prior mini-masterwork Tyger almost immediately; it carries the same sense of menace and whimsy, and some similar visual elements even if it was created using wholly different techniques and is in a way far more ambitious. Another stunner is Gloria Victoria, by a Canadian filmmaker named Theodore Ushev that I was unfamiliar with but will be keeping an eye out for from now own; his striking Constructivist-influenced design style feels very attuned to his anti-war themes and his motion marches perfectly to the Shostakovich soundtrack he selected. But I picked Ridgeway's film to highlight in particular because he's expected to attend the screening tonight.

HOW: All the Shorts 3 selections will screen digitally.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 12 of the festival also includes the final screening of Manakamana- on the Kabuki's biggest screen!! - and of Kazakh film Harmony Lessons. It also features the first showing of Lukas Moodysson's We Are The Best!

NON-SFIFF OPTION: It's discount night at the Roxie Cinema so if you still haven't caught Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin on a big screen yet, tonight's your chance to do so for half the price of a regular SFIFF ticket.

Of Horses Of Men (2013)

A scene from Benedikt Erlingsson's OF HORSES AND MEN, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24- May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: This is the first feature film written and directed by Icelandic theatre director Benedikt Erlingsson, best known in the film world for his acting role in Lars Von Trier's The Boss of It All

WHAT: "You going to let me catch you?" asks Kolbeinn, the dapper Alpha male of a small, isolated community of ranchers and tour guides obsessed with all things equine by tradition if no longer exactly by necessity. His question is to his pride and joy, a white mare he saddles up for a brisk gallop across the landscape to pay a call on a fellow horse-owner and her tri-generational but patriarch-less family. Indeed, Kolbeinn (played by internationally-experienced actor Ingvar E. Sigurðsson). His ride is a show for the audience, for himself, and for the entire plateau, as he is observed (often through telescopic lenses) by just about everyone across the plateau. The expanse between dwellings doesn't prevent a close-knit community from being a bunch of nosy neighbors, intensely curious about the potential blood-line mixing of any of the horses or humans in their midst.

This scene sets up an easy laugh that I'm not sure why I'm hesitant in giving away since it's actually telegraphed through very careful editing for minutes before. But perhaps the anticipation only increases the payoff. The audience I saw this scene with yesterday let out little chuckles and other utterances during the foreshadowing moments, and then erupted into a full-scale group belly-laugh once it arrived.

The scene introduces us to glimpses of all the key characters we'll be following through various vignettes throughout the rest of Of Horses and Men; the organizers of group riding and horse-culture immersion tours, an alcoholic husband; an attractive young equestrienne, a Spanish traveler, etc. Here they're briefly shown as observers of Kolbeinn's embarrassing moment, but soon enough they'll have their own adventures to make. Many of them result in some kind of tragedy. All of them revolve around horses.

There's no question that Erlingsson and his crew photograph these beasts with awe and care, although the grim fates that befall some of them and their riders counterbalance the film's leanings into Tourist-Authority-sanctioned territory. As such, the film fulfills the long-nurtured love affair between the motion picture camera and the horse, going back as far as Eadweard Muybridge and continuing through just about every Western and large-scale historical epic made during Yakima Canutt's lifetime. But I must admit I found the film's thematic paralleling of human and animal relationships to be frequently superficial, uninspired, and unworthy of the craft put into staging and filming. Perhaps I'm just slightly allergic to the overlapping vignette framework being employed here, for the same reasons that Magnolia is my least favorite Paul Thomas Anderson film and Crash my least favorite Best Picture winner in recent memory. Though Of Horses And Men is not as facile as a Paul Haggis film, the fact that I'm thinking of one at all makes me hesitant to enthusiastically recommend it to serious cinephiles. Trot with caution.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 8:45 tonight and 6:00 Monday at the Kabuki, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: This is the only one of the films competing for SFIFF's New Directors Prize (only first- and second-time feature filmmakers are eligible) that I've seen so far, unfortunately. Luckily, all but one of the others (The Blue Wave) are still playing during the final several days of the festival. Here is the list of the competitors for the $10,000 cash award that last year went to the Turkish film Present Tense.

HOW: DCP

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 10 features the final festival screenings of Lav Diaz's Norte, the End of History and Hong Sangsoo's Our Sunhi. I'd have featured the latter for today's post had my friend Adam Hartzell not already written quite a bit about it for this blog.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The Yerba Buena Center For the Arts began the biggest tribute to Studio Ghibli ever presented in the Bay Area on Thursday, and tonight's double-bill of Nausicaa And The Valley of the Wind and Whisper of the Heart gives a great sense of the broadness of the kind of work being done at that Japanese animation stronghold over the years.

All That Jazz (1979)

A scene from Bob Fosse's ALL THAT JAZZ, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24- May 8, 2014. 

WHO: Bob Fosse wrote and directed this.

WHAT: A 1979 film by a director who'd already proved himself one of the great auteurs of the 1970s with films released in 1972 and 1974 (one of which earned him the Best Director Academy Award), but who found his film, probably his most ambitious to date, defeated by Robert Benton and Kramer Vs. Kramer at the Oscars that year. At least he had the consolation of a shared Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for this magnificent work.

That last paragraph could describe Francis Ford Coppola and Apocalypse Now but it just as easily describes Fosse and All That Jazz, which for me is easily his cinematic masterpiece. Too-often ignored in accountings of the great films of the 1970s, this highly-personal work, something of a dance-film extension of the themes of Fellini's 8 1/2, is one of the great films about artistic creation in the face of physical and creative roadblocks. It makes a particularly good comparison piece for those of us who saw Abuse of Weakness last night, but it's absolutely worth seeing on the big screen regardless. As Melissa Anderson wrote earlier this year in Artforum:

This phenomenal 1979 film, a work of “depressive exhilaration,” in the astute words of Sam Wasson, author of the excellent, recently published biography Fosse, was the director’s third (and final) Hollywood musical, following Sweet Charity (1969), an adaptation of Fosse’s 1966 stage production of the same name, and Cabaret (1972). All three movies are obsidian prisms reflecting the darker, seamier aspects of show business, informed by the desperate ambience that Fosse observed first-hand as a teenage dancer in the burlesque halls of his native Chicago. Those formative, often scarring years as an entertainer are re-presented in All That Jazz, in which Fosse’s self-regard is no match for his self-excoriation.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive, at 8:30 PM, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: Although the San Francisco International Film Festival has made many changes in the 10 years I've been attending as press, the most talked-about changes (the five executive directors the festival has had during that time, most notably) don't appear (to me) to provide as much substantial transformation of the festival's character, in terms of the amount of quality works that an above-averagely-interested attendee could see every year. The more notable transformation, in my outlook, is the shift in dominant projection format over the years, to the point where I was earlier this week able to round-up all of this year's expected 35mm, 16mm and super-8 work in a single paragraph. Seeing Paul Clipson's incredible Bright Mirror shown from a Super-8 projector set up in the middle of the Kabuki's House 3, reminded me of how the festival a decade ago would set up a special projector in the middle of the room to show video works, as film was the Kabuki's standard format and the widespread dominance of DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages) was only a futuristic imagining.

I have no problem watching DCPs of new films at SFIFF, especially those shot on video cameras in the first place (increasingly more of them), and my Senses of Cinema article on the 2005 festival used the role of digital production and distribution in fulfilling a film festival's mandate as a frame. If I were to write an update today, I'd stress how we're now at the point in the evolution of digital filming and presentation technology where a filmmaker insisting on shooting or projecting on film is now making a deliberate choice to greatly limit his or her options for processing, exhibition, and so on throughout the chain of getting images in front of audience eyes. Even films created in the age of celluloid, by makers who expected the subtleties of their manipulation of chemistry to impress their vision onto screens, are steadily being transformed (though the industry buzzwords are the paradoxical "digitally restored") into collections of electronic signals. Generally, the more high-profile the revival, the more likely it is to be digital-only and to replace all legitimate film-on-film distribution of a given title. The 2014 Cannes Classics line-up, for instance, will be the first-ever in that sidebar to present only DCPs and no 35mm prints.

Though I'm increasingly finding myself able to appreciate a DCP screening of classic films, I'm far less apt to go out of my way to see one than a 35mm print. Knowing that the latter is becoming scarcer and scarcer only ups the ante on the sense of "unique event" that running a physical print through a projector really was all along, no matter how ubiquitous it seemed. Scarcity of digital screenings of any given title feels far more artificial; there's far less of a physical barrier to a cinema projecting a digital copy of a classic than there is to screening one of a finite number of prints. Still, sometimes I want to see a movie on a cinema screen no matter how it's presented. It never really bothered me that prior SFIFFs included video-projected showings of Latin American rarities like Los Inundados and We Are The Music; how else was I going to see these great works otherwise? Short of going back in time to 2009 (the last time All That Jazz showed in 35mm in the Bay Area, as far as I can recall), tonight's showing is as good as we're likely to get.

HOW: All the usual sources have said that All That Jazz screens from a DCP. But the Film Foundation's own website lists it as a 35mm print. This discrepancy raises an eyebrow only because last year the Film Foundation shipped both a DCP and a 35mm print of The Mattei Affair to the festival, which was lucky because the DCP proved to be technically troublesome at the PFA. Assuming the festival is similarly prepared this year, might it be worth crossing fingers for a snafu?

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: SFIFF's Day 9 features another revived title: Lino Brocka's Manila In The Claws of Light. The final screening of the gripping marital-conflict drama If You Don't, I Will starring Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos and the sole festival screening of Boyhood with director Richard Linklater in person also happen today, although if you don't have a ticket already you'll need to wait in the Rush Line for these latter two showings.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: A double-bill of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and Sorry, Wrong Number defies the trend of DCPs superceding 35mm prints forever, as the latter fairly recently screened at the PFA as a DCP, but will show in 35mm, like the rest of the Stanford's current Barbara Stanwyck series. It runs through Sunday.

Abuse Of Weakness (2013)

A scene from Catherine Breillat's ABUSE OF WEAKNESS, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Catherine Breillat wrote and directed this.

WHAT: I have not yet seen Abuse of Weakness but I'm excited for the chance to follow a filmmaker who I greatly associate with the SFIFF over the years. In 2002 the festival showed her underrated Brief Crossing, and two years later she attended in person for a showing of Sex Is Comedy, which was a semi-autobiographical account of the making of her notorious Fat Girl. Shortly after that visit to San Francisco Breillat suffered a series of strokes which she recovered from well enough to appear at the Castro for the 2008 festival opening night selection The Last Mistress. These were followed by festival selections Bluebeard and The Sleeping Beauty in 2009 and 2011 respectively, and now after three films set in the far-off past, she returns to the very recent past. Abuse of Weakness is said to be based on Breillat's own autobiography since Sex is Comedy, starring Isabelle Huppert as a stand-in for herself. For reviews I direct you once again to Critics Round Up.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at 9PM at the Kabuki, presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: I understand Abuse of Weakness screens in the Kabuki's House 1, by far the largest screen the festival uses other than the Castro's, and worth going out of one's way to see films in. It's where I saw Brief Crossing and Sex is Comedy, and can't help but wonder if that's part of why I preferred those to Bluebeard, which unfolded in a more intimate space. Breillat's films do not eschew spectacular dimensions, and it seems unlikely that, despite theatrical distribution from Strand Releasing expected for Abuse of Weakness, this will be the largest theatre Frisco Bay movie lovers will ever be able to see it in. Note that I've learned Manakanama will screen in House 1 for its final festival screening this Monday afternoon. Wish I could go to that!

I'm impressed that the SFIFF picked a Breillat film to run in its sole screening on the festival's "Awards Night" tonight, when deep-pocketed donors spring for a chance to hobnob with festival awardees like Richard Linklater, Stephen Gaghan, Jeremy Irons and John Lasseter. In past years the "middle Thursday" programming has often seemed a bit calmer than most nights, with lots of second screenings of films already premiered. Does having the only festival showing of a major auteur work on the same night as this party signal something about a disconnect between the financial engine of the festival and the desires of local rank-and-cinephiles?

HOW: DCP

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 8 of SFIFF gives festgoers final chances at seeing the Viennese "Frederick Wiseman lite" documentary The Great Museum, Nobuhiro Yamashita's low-key twenty-something portrait Tamako In Moratorium, and the "director's cut" of Patrice Chereau's Queen Margot.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The Castro Theatre just revealed its full May calendar, which starts off tonight with a bang: 35mm prints of the late Vera Chytilová's Daisies and of Allan Moyle's rare gem Times Square.

Reversal Of Fortune (1990)

Screen capture from Warner Home Video DVD edition of REVERSAL OF FORTUNE, published 2001.

WHO: Jeremy Irons won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in this.

WHAT: I have not seen this film, directed by Barbet Schroeder, who started his career in in the trenches of the French New Wave, producing some of Eric Rohmer's and Jacques Rivette's greatest films before building a very unusual career as a director in his own right. It was shot by cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, who in addition to frequently working with Schroeder, had shot films for Michaelangelo Antonioni (including The Passenger) and Dario Argento (including Suspiria). But it's Irons who is most associated with Reversal of Fortune, turning the notorious Danish defendant in a tabloid-ready attempted murder trial Claus von Bülow into one of his career-defining roles.  Edward Copeland writes: "Irons' perfect mimicry of the Danish aristocrat is but a small portion of his outstanding performance that infuses Claus with a jet-black sense of humor about his plight."

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:30 tonight at the Kabuki's House 1, as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: Only last week, the San Francisco International Film Festival announced it was giving its Peter J. Owens Award for screen acting to Jeremy Irons. It's becoming something of a tradition for SFIFF to lock up this particular award well after the rest of the festival is announced. Last year's Harrison Ford selection and 2011's Terence Stamp tribute were both late announcements. I don't know if this tradition is because actors are increasingly wary of committing to attend events like this weeks in advance of them, or because the festival likes the publicity bump a celebrity can bring to be timed apart from the full program announcement. At any rate, the events themselves are said not to suffer. I heard the Stamp interview in particular was one of the best in recent memory, and if I only hadn't locked my schedule in place to make sure I could see Georgian filmmaker Otar Iosseliani in person, I'd have surely been there that year.

Tonight I'm tempted to go as well, though I'd probably be more tempted if the festival were showing Dead Ringers, an Irons-showcase masterpiece I sometimes cite as the best film I never want to see again, simply because it's so overpoweringly dark. But if it played in 35mm with Irons (or its director David Cronenberg, or perhaps other players involved) in person near me, I couldn't resist. I hear Reversal of Fortune is excellent as well, though; it's pedigree is certainly strong enough as you can see from my "WHAT" paragraph (which didn't even mention Glenn Close, who is also supposed to be great in it).

Though it was mentioned, along with this award, as a "To Be Announced" festival event during the April 1st press conference, the SFIFF's annual State of the Cinema address is nowhere to be seen, which is a disappointment. These events have been frequently wonderful food for thought; I'm particularly remembering Walter Murch's and Tilda Swinton's fondly. Last year's by Steven Soderbergh is a hard act to follow, but I would love to see the festival choose an archivist to present her or his thoughts on the current state of movies someday soon. Perhaps it will have to be next year.

HOW: Reversal of Fortune screens from a 35mm print, proving it's still possible to run reels onto one of the Kabuki's eight screens, even if it's now a rare occasion. The last time I attended such a screening was at last year's festival when The Insider was shown as part of a tribute to screenwriter Eric Roth, to an embarrassingly sparse crowd. It was beautiful.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 7 at the festival is your last chance to catch two films I wrote a bit about earlier this week: Stray Dogs and Bright Mirror, the latter being part of a shorts program that's been getting a lot of acclaim from experimental film scenesters.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Tonight and tomorrow a Fred MacMurray/Barbara Stanwyck double-bill of Remember the Night and There's Always Tomorrow screens as part of the Stanford Theatre's all-35mm Stanwyck series, which has only three more weeks in it and is worth heading down to Palo Alto for. The lobby's display of original documents concerning the most famous MacMurray/Stanwyck pairing Double Indemnity is an absolute must for anyone who appreciates that seminal film.

Stray Dogs (2013)

A scene from Tsai Ming-liang's STRAY DOGS, playing at the 57th San Franicsco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

WHO: Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based auteur Tsai Ming-Liang directed and co-wrote this.

WHAT: Tsai's films have long developed recurrent themes of home and rootlessness, but with Stray Dogs he uses these to create his rawest, bitterest attack on Taiwan's inequalities thus far. His first digital feature employs surveillance-style footage of his actor fetiche Lee Kang-sheng and two youngsters tramping through and setting camp in locations "stolen" whether by crew or characters. It culminates in a fourteen-minute take that's simultaneously unforgiving and about forgiveness.

That 75-word capsule is all I'm allowed to write while we await a potential commercial distribution of this film, but there are plenty of more untethered critics who have written very thoughtfully and substantially on Stray Dogs and most (though surprisingly not Martin Tsai's useful reading) are linked on the addictive Critics Round Up website.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 3:15 PM today at New People and 6:30 PM tomorrow at the Pacific Film Archive, both thanks to the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: It's been just over seven years since a new Tsai Ming-Liang feature film has appeared in Frisco Bay cinemas. The last was I Don't Want To Sleep Alone, which debuted here in April 2007 at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts. In the meantime, Tsai's 2009 film Face received mixed-at-best reviews at other film festivals around the world, bypassed local cinema screens, and has not even been officially released on DVD (though I've been told it's on Netflix Instant, I've never subscribed and have still yet to catch up with this work; I suppose I still hold out hope it may arrive through another means). And a new featurette called Journey To The West has just started making festival rounds, though it has yet to land here yet.

Watching Stray Dogs made me realize how rusty I've gotten at watching Tsai's films in cinemas, and made me want to have that experience again with one of his prior films. Not a moment too soon, I received an advance look at a program YBCA's Joel Shepard put together for this summer. One of the selections in this screening series is my own (a real honor and my first stab at programming 35mm, I picked a Robert Altman film that means an awful lot to me) but I think I'm equally excited to see the other nine films in the series. Eight of them I've never seen at all and in most cases have longed to for years, and the ninth (or should I say the first), screening July 20th, is a Tsai film I've only seen on home video before: The Hole. It was my introduction to his work way back when, and I'm thrilled to be able to get a chance to watch it in 35mm in just a few short months. Here's the full line-up for the YBCA series:

Invasion of the Cinemaniacs!
July 20 - Sept 25
Sun, Jul 20, 2pm Karen Larsen presents The Hole By Tsai Ming-liang
Thu, Jul 24, 7:30pm Brian Darr presents The Company By Robert Altman
Sun, Jul 27, 2pm Jonathan L. Knapp presents Colorado Territory By Raoul Walsh
Sat, Aug 9, 7:30pm Cheryl Eddy presents Death Wish 3 By Michael Winner
Sun, Aug 10, 2pm Adam Hartzell presents Madame Freedom By Han Hyeong-mo
Sat, Aug 23, 7:30pm Michael Guillén presents Hell Without Limits (El Lugar Sin Límites) By Arturo Ripstein
Sun, Aug 24, 2pm David Wong presents The Exile By Max Ophüls
Thurs, Sept 18, 7:30pm Alby Lim presents Pietà By Kim Ki-duk
Sun, Sept 21, 2pm Lynn Cursaro presents Little Fugitive By Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin & Ray Ashley
Thurs, Sept 25, 7:30pm David Robson presents The Brides Of Dracula By Terence Fisher

HOW: Stray Dogs screens digitally, as it was shot.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 6 allows festgoers a final chance to see Manuscripts Don't Burn, Blind Dates and All About the Feathers, and features the first of two silent film/indie rock pairings of SFIFF57: Thao and the Get Down Stay Down playing new music for Charlie Chaplin's The Pawn Shop, Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich’s The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra, and more.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub's Too Soon, Too Late screens digitally at Black Hole Cinematheque in Oakland.

Club Sandwich (2013)

A scene from Fernando Eimbcke's CLUB SANDWICH, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society..

WHO: Mexican auteur Fernando Eimbcke wrote and directed this, his third feature film, following Duck Season and Lake Tahoe.

WHAT: One of my favorite scenes from Club Sandwich comes toward the end of the film. (You may want to skip ahead if you're a spoiler-averse hardliner, although I don't think this film or this scene depend on narrative surprise for their success.) Four people are in a car driving on an unpopulated road, and the camera is placed on the hood so we can see all four through the windshield. The driver is Enrique Arreola, who played the pizza deliveryman in Duck Season. Here his role is much smaller; just this scene and another, and no words of dialogue (although his voice is heard on a radio in a third scene, presumably not playing the same character). In the passenger seat is Danae Reynaud, who's playing Paloma, a thirty-something mother of a teenage boy named Hector, played by  Lucio Giménez Cacho (son of Spanish film star Daniel Giménez Cacho, making his film debut). Hector and 16-year-old Jazimn (played by María Renée Prudencio, another screen newcomer) are making out in the back seat while Paloma hunches asleep in her seat. Eventually she wakes up, starts looking around at her surroundings, and finally glances in the rear-view mirror the smooching the audience has been able to watch all along. Though visibly perturbed she plays it cool, yelping as she pretends to swat a mosquito as a way to alert the ineptly-furtive youngsters that their romance just might be discovered.

Club Sandwich, like Eimbcke's prior features, has a title that appears almost random and tossed-off upon first glance. Early in the film, we think we understand its connection to the film when that food is ordered by Paloma and Hector, a single mom and her 15-year-old on a cheap vacation in Oaxaca during the too-hot-for-tourists season. With the hotel pool to themselves, they lounge determinedly, their comments about each others' swimsuits and body shapes revealing a habitual closeness between the pair almost as much as does their frequent nagging of each other about stray fluids in the bathroom (the shower floor; the toilet seat) or the apparent awkwardness Hector exhibits when his hot mom rubs sunscreen over his broad back. He's at the age when he's longing for a less motherly form of female touching, but of course Paloma is the last person on earth he wants to know that.

But there's not really such thing as a sandwich with only two elements to it. Another family arrives at the hotel, and the way lovely Jazmin and Hector at first avoid each other makes quite clear that each has got at least one eye on the only other member of their peer group in sight. Eimbcke is after three films proving himself to be a master of presenting unspoken communication. He guides his three lead actors to tell us just about all we need to know about their characters through their glances, their gestures, and their body language. Inevitably, Jazmin introduces herself to Hector, and soon enough she's the one rubbing lotions on his back as they have deeply laconic conversations about air conditioning, which lead to more lustful interactions. Only when out of their parents' eyesight of course.

So can these three form a club? Once she realizes what's going on with her son (or some of it, anyway; I haven't mentioned his fascination with her bikini top or his late-night masturbation sessions), Paloma makes an effort to draw Jazmin into the kind of conversation Hector had no need to stoop to: what's her family like, what are her interests, etc. By now knows she won't get anywhere talking with Hector about her; there's nothing more mortifying for a teenage boy than admitting to your mother that you're a sexual being. But she finally lets her guard down and reveals just how jealous she is of her son's emergence from family cocooning, in a hilariously and poignantly awkward late night variation on truth-or-dare. It's a perfect climax to a charming, funny little gem of a film.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens tonight at 9:15 at New People Cinema, and 1:30 PM on Sunday, May 4, both screenings presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: If you click on the "guests expected" box for any SFIFF program you can find out if a director, producer, actor or other filmmaker plans to be on hand in support of his or her film. However, this method doesn't reveal whether a filmmaker is actually going to attend a given screening if there are multiple showings. For that information it's best to visit the big calendar board in the Kabuki lobby, where each screening is individually marked (or not) with a star indicating whether a guest plans to be there. In the case of Club Sandwich for example, writer-director Eimbcke gave a delightful q&a session to the audience for an afternoon screening April 26th, and is expected to still be around for tonight's showing, but at this point he's not expected for the May 4th showing.

HOW: Digital.
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OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 5 of SFIFF includes the final screenings of the acclaimed Romainian film When Evening Falls on Bucharest and of Julie Bertucelli's documentary School of Babel. It also marks the first festival screenings of Tsai Ming-Liang's Stray Dogs and François Ozon's Young & Beautiful.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: If you missed Bruce Baillie's appearance at the festival yesterday, he's still in town for another day, and will be screening recent works including the in-progress Memoirs of an Angel tonight at Oakland's always-free Black Hole Cinematheque.

Bright Mirror (2013)

A scene from Paul Clipson's BRIGHT MIRROR, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014 

WHO: Paul Clipson made this.

WHAT: Though I mentioned it as one of my favorite undistributed new films seen in 2013, I never wrote anything about Bright Mirror last year during my post-a-day chronicling of the Frisco Bay film screening scene. I actually saw it on a DVD I borrowed during the Canyon Cinema pop-up last December, so I'm excited to finally see it projected in a cinema thanks to the San Francisco International Film Festival. 

I usually get a lot of pleasure from watching local filmmaker & film projectionist Clipson's work in a public setting. His unique eye for capturing beautiful light & color patterns and arranging them, often through in-camera editing and/or multiple-exposures has provided him with a robust body of work that frequently gets showcased in cinemas, galleries and live music spaces across Frisco Bay and beyond. But Bright Mirror feels like a step into new territory for him; though it contains visual trademarks that are unmistakably his, it feels like it hearkens back to a tradition of metaphor and body movement reconnecting him to the psychodramas of Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson and early Stan Brakhage, that dominated the mid-century explosion of avant-garde filmmaking in California. If these sorts of images make a resurgence among up-and-coming experimenters in the coming years, I wonder if we'll be able to trace it back to Bright Mirror and Paul.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a SFIFF program playing today at the Pacific Film Archive at 5:45, and at the Kabuki on April 30th at 9:30.

WHY: While announcing the SFIFF line-up at a press conference earlier this month, Director of Programming Rachel Rosen noted that "16mm is going to outlast 35mm in the festival setting", and for new films this appears to have already been proven true. Barring some kind of unexpected last-minute change, there will be no recently-made films screened on the once-dominant theatrical exhibition format at the 57th edition of the longest-running film festival in North America. (This would make last year's second screening of Kerry Laitala's Conjuor's Box the final new 35mm film to play during the SFIFF'a fifty-six years in the 35mm era). There are several a few 16mm shorts screening in the Shirts 5 program, including Lawrence Jordan's Entr'Acte and Charlotte Pryce's A Study In Natural Magic, as well as Bright Mirror, which screens on its native Super-8 film format, but the rest are either revived titles (Bruce Baillie's Little Girl from 1966; Jim Jennings's Lost And Found from 1988) or digital projections. Just like the rest of the SFIFF program this year. And apart from this shorts program, even the revivals are mostly being presented digitally; All That Jazz, Queen Margot and Manila in the Claws of Neon are all newly-made DCPs for example. The counter-examples come mostly in the live music programs at the Castro Theatre; Eastman House has provided 35mm prints of both Charlie Chaplin's brilliant short The Pawnshop for its Tuesday April 29th screening (along with other works) accompanied by live music from Thao and the Get Down Stay Down, and of Tod Browning's depraved 1927 masterpiece The Unknown, which Stephin Merritt (of Magnetic Fields) will accompany May 6th. The only other 35mm screening we can expect at SFIFF is of Barbet Schoeder's Reversal of Fortune, for which Jeremy Irons received the 1990 Best Actor Academy Award, and which therefore seems to be the obvious choice for his Wednesday, April 30 evening in-person tribute at the Kabuki.

Note that experimental film legend Bruce Baillie is expected to be among the guests at today's PFA screening of Little Girl, but that he won't be at the Kabuki screening of the film. Clipson will be doing double-duty as filmmaker and by helping out on the 16mm and Super-8 projection of the films at the Kabuki, in order to help make the San Francisco screening as technically smooth as it's likely to be at the PFA.

HOW: As noted above, Bright Mirror will screen in Super-8, on a program with 16mm and digital video work.

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Today's your last day to see the wonderfully strange and funny Serge Bozon film Tip Top at the festival. Definitely a polarizing film that despite nominal distribution seems highly unlikely to appear on a Frisco Bay screen again in the near future. It's also the day of "New Queer Cinema" icon Isaac Julien's on-stage conversation with B. Ruby Rich with a single-channel screening of his installation piece Ten Thousand Waves.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: The Castro Theatre is counter-programming SFIFF (on the days when it's not being rented by them) with a healthy dose of older films shown on 35mm prints, and tonight's double-bill of Robert Aldrich's Emperor of the North and Richard Fleischer's The Narrow Margin is one of the most cinephile-enticing on their schedule in the coming weeks.

Santa Cruz Del Islote (2014)

A scene from Luke Lorentzen's SANTA CRUZ DEL ISLOTE, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society. 

WHO: Luke Lorentzen is the Stanford-based filmmaker who directed this, and many other familiar Frisco Bay filmmaking names (consulting producer Jamie Meltzer, sound mixer Dan Olmstead, etc.) are found in the credits.

WHAT: I haven't seen any of the San Francisco International Film Festival's documentary features yet, but I'd be very surprised if many of them are more able to probe an otherwise-invisible corner of the globe with more artistic and documentary integirty than Santa Cruz Del Islote, a 20-minute short about the most densely-populated island in the world. Even Manhattan and Hong Kong have more open space per capita than this 1200-person, 2.4-acre speck off the coast of Columbia, made up of wall-to-wall fisherman's shacks. Eschewing talking heads and infographics for a visually sumptuous approach (every shot is simply gorgeous), Lorentzen allows the island's residents to provide a sparse narration to contextualize what we're seeing and hearing, but for the most part this is not a verbal but a sensory experience of what life is like in the built-up little town and out in the fishing boats. For the residents of Santa Cruz Del Islote, the sky above and the Caribbean around them is their only wilderness, and Lorentzen often frames the horizon low to emphasize the vastness of the island's blue surroundings.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a program beginning tonight at 7PM and on Sunday, May 4th at 3:45., both at the Kabuki Theatre.

WHY: Santa Cruz Del Islote screens on the (numerically, not chronologically) first of the San Francisco International Film Festival's seven shorts programs (though one might call this Tuesday's Castro Theatre program an unofficial eighth). This program is nominally half-documentary and half-narrative, but there's definitely some bleedover. There's a documentary element to Jim Granato's comedic narrative Angels, for example, and though up for a documentary award, John Haptas, Kris Samuelson, and Seiwert's Barn Dance is really a performance staged for the camera. Throw in Bill Morrison's archival-footage-based Re:Awakenings, and it makes for a very diverse and surprising program, as SFIFF shorts programs so often are.

HOW: Digital

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 3 at the festival includes other shorts programs such as the also-excellent animation showcase. It's also the night of the first screenings of anticipated-by-me films like Tamako In Moratorium and Our Sunhi.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Other Cinema's weekly screening tonight features the local single-channel premiere of Sam Green's Study of Fog as well as other Frisco-centric offerings.

Manakamana (2013)

A scene from Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez's MANAKAMANA, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24 - May 8, 2014. Courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society

WHO: Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez are the co-directors of this experimental documentary.

WHAT: I have not yet seen Manakamana, but I've been anticipating it since I first heard about it last summer, when I was primed to see more work by directors associated with the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, beyond Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, who teamed up to make my favorite feature film of 2013, Leviathan. This one is frequently described as an aesthetic opposite of that camera-chaotic work. Featuring eleven static long takes by a 16mm camera planted in a moving cable car ascending a mountain toward a Nepalese temple, it sounds like it may formally resemble a cross between James Benning's 13 Lakes and Ernie Gehr's Side/Walk/Shuttle. But Spray and Velez also come out of an anthropological tradition of filmmaking influenced by Robert Gardner (as discussed a bit in this interview), so I expect much of the film's interest to come from the human element visually absent from Gehr's and Benning's pieces. Indeed, I was recently fortunate to be able to see an untitled 2010 single-take short made in Nepal by Spray, and it begged the viewer to seriously con.sider the complexity of his or her relationship to the people being depicted on screen, and to the filmmaking apparatus itself, as well as the dynamics between Spray and her subjects.

Manakamana was released in New York City last week and has been reviewed extensively. A relatively new website called Critics Round Up has links to many of the most significant voices on the film. Don't expect San Francisco International Film Festival-credentialed critics to be added to the list however, as until Spray's & Velez's film secures commercial distribution here, it will remain in the strange limbo of the "hold review", in which local writers aren't allowed to review the film in more than 75 words.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at New People Cinema tonight at 6PM and this Sunday afternoon at 1PM, and at the Kabuki on Monday, May 5th at 2PM.

WHY: Manakamana seems like the kind of moviegoing experience that can't really be replicated on small screens at home, and therefore begs to be seen in a cinema. And it's not one of the several SFIFF selections screening tonight that has already gone to "Rush Status", meaning a wait in line for a chance to get a ticket. If you haven't yet mapped out your whole festival, then there's no better place to start figuring it out than by looking at David Hudson's round-up of capsule previews and other press the festival has received up to this point. As he notes, the SF Bay Guardian has more extensive coverage than the SF Weekly, but that's been the norm for a while now. I imagine SFIFF staff and fans feel some mixed emotions about even the SFBG's coverage though, as for the past couple years now the fact that it gives SFIFF its cover story is blunted by the fact that they wrap this issue (unlike almost any others they publish each year) with an advertisement, thus depriving the city of the sense that the festival is the place to be this week, staring out at them from newsstands and coffee shops across town. Oh well; at least they haven't, like SF Weekly has, given more column inches to that Silicon Valley tv show than to SFIFF.

HOW: Digital

OTHER SFIFF OPTIONS: Day 2 includes the first local screenings of films by Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu, Frenchman Serge Bozon and Iranian Mohammad Rasoulof as well as a number of lesser-known directoral quantities.

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Mildred Pierce screens in 35mm at Oakland's Paramount Theatre as part of its occasional classic film series that always includes cartoon & newsreel for only $5 admission. The Paramount has announced three more screenings of films with perhaps somewhat more dubious "classic" status (ok, I'm mostly talking about The Goonies) than this Joan Crawford noir between now and mid-July.

The Two Faces Of January (2014)

 Viggo Mortensen, Oscar Isaac, and Kirsten Dunst star in Hossein Amini's thriller, THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY, playing at the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival, April 24- May 8, 2014. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society

WHO: Hossein Amini has had a long and successful screenwriting career for nearly two decades (longer if you include short-form and television work). There may not be anyone who would call the films he's adapted from Thomas Hardy (1996's Jude), Henry James (1997's The Wings of the Dove) or James Sallis (2011's Drive) better than they were as novels, but they each acquit themselves more nicely than expected, thanks to Amini and the directors he's worked with (Michael Winterbottom, Iain Softley and Nicolas Winding Refn), who tend to get more of the credit. Until now, Amini had never directed one of his own adaptations. This is his first. He is expected to attend the screening tonight.

WHAT: The Two Faces of January is based on a 1964 novel by Patricia Highsmith, best known to cinephiles as the author of novels that turned into films such as Strangers On A Train, Purple Noon, and the Talented Mr. Ripley. It just premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February, where it was reviewed by Tim Robey for the Telegraph. I'll provide an excerpt:

...it’s tightly engineered and doesn’t waste words. But it’s also a treat to look at and listen to, evoking a lot of old-fashioned movie virtues, and showing us a lush but suspenseful good time. From the start, as holidaying Americans Chester (Viggo Mortensen) and Colette (Kirsten Dunst) take a turn around the Parthenon in 1962, we get that tingle that comes with feeling in safe hands.

WHERE/WHEN: 7PM tonight at the Castro Theatre, kicking off the 57th San Francisco International Film Festival.

WHY: As I noted this time last year I've never actually attended the opening night of the San Francisco International Film Festival. I must admit the ticket price has always scared me away, and even those years when the festival's press department has invited me to attend, I've declined, figuring that the seat could be used by someone else and that I'd be able to catch the film another time.

This time I accepted, even though those factors still hold true. (The film is tentatively set to open in the Bay Area in September.) I never thought I'd say this, but I'm excited that the festival was able to book a film that will be receiving its North American premiere. It's played a few European festivals, but so far none of the critics I regularly read have written about it, and I'm interested to get a look at a film with a fairly strong artistic and commercial pedigree (stars include Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst & Oscar Isaac, none of whom are known to make stinkers very often) before the loudest, most confident critical voices have weighed in on it first. This never used to be a concern for me, but I find that in the few years I've been following numerous regular attendees of festivals like Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, etc. on twitter, my enthusiasm for an anticipated film is often accompanied by a feeling that I may not be able to experience it entirely on my own, but that in watching and evaluating it I'm somehow joining forces in a battle where the lines have already been drawn.

Opening night films at SFIFF are usually very solid films, but they only occasionally feel as completely brand-new as the opening film of a big festival somehow ought to be. For one night, if only one night, San Francisco ought to feel a little like the center of the film world, at least to its residents. With The Two Faces of January as opening-night selection and Alex Of Venice for closing night, both the bookending gala films of the festival are brand-new, 2014 films that had not screened at any 2013 festivals. This has happened before at SFIFF; in 2012 Farewell, My Queen and Don't Stop Believin': Everybody's Journey were truly new to that year, but even those had both screened in other parts of the country before their Frisco stop. You have to go back to the 1999 SFIFF (the first I attended) when The Winslow Boy opened and Buena Vista Social Club closed the festival to find another year that might contend in the "gala freshness" department.

Other SFIFF "premiere" titles I'm excited to see include Sara Dosa's The Last Season (a world premiere from local filmmaker Sara Dosa) and Tamako In Moratorium (a North American premiere from the director of Linda Linda Linda). 

HOW: Almost the entire festival this year is screening digitally, and The Two Faces of January is no exception. Theoretically, the proliferation of digital projection in the festival world (not just SFIFF but Cannes, Toronto and most others as well) should make the likelihood of seeing new work quicker higher, though it doesn't always seem to work out that way. 

NON-SFIFF OPTION: Tonight's Oddball Films program looks like a splendid line-up of 16mm ethnographic documentaries made around the world.