Little White Lies Are All About the Truth

By Emma Krasov The usual French film premise – a group of 30-something friends divided into couples, ex-couples, couples on a verge of a bre...

Chilling “Elena” From the Depths of the Mysterious Russian Soul Comes to Bay Area Screens

By Emma Krasov Elena, a new film by Andrey Zvyagintsev, who co-wrote the script with Oleg Negin, starts with a view of a Moscow apartment ...

Black-and-White and Silent, The Artist is a 21st Century Hit

By Emma Krasov The Artist , a French film, now distributed in the U.S., seems to complete the life cycle of cinematography as we know it bef...

Not Your Grandma’s Ballet - Giselle in 3D

Bay Are ballet studious in full attendance and balletomanes of all ages filled out movie theatres in San Francisco, Daly City, Pleasant Hill...

Love and Other Drugs – Holiday Season’s Feel-Good Fairy Tale

By Emma Krasov Jake Gyllenhaal as a pleasure-chasing lover boy – say no more. The movie could be a [generic] version of Sidney Pollack’s lon...

Life as Art in Mao's Last Dancer

By Emma Krasov A story of a classically trained dancer from Communist China making his way into the world of creative and personal freedom i...

Don’t mess with Michael Caine, I mean, Harry Brown

By Emma Krasov The film Harry Brown (directed by Daniel Barber, screenplay by Gary Young) puts its hero’s name in the title thus elevating ...

Make it a Date Night with Carell and Fey

By Emma Krasov I hope you have a date this Friday night, but even if you don’t, you won’t be disappointed by the action-packed Date Night d...

Avatar Lush Imagery, Please… Hold the Story

A film to end all visual-effects films, James Cameron’s Avatar is now playing everywhere, equally fascinating audiences of all levels of edu...

Self-Portrait in Broken Embraces, Pedro Almodovar

Lost to Hollywood’s high-tech and eyes-on-the-prize culture, this art remains purely European, still present in “author films” made by the g...

A Perfect Getaway is Perfectly Entertaining

During the energetic and cinematographically engaging opening scenes you wonder how Milla Jovovich could possibly be cast in a demure role ...

Brüno Enters America Through the Back Door

The adventures of Brüno, a contemporary descendant of Voltaire’s Candide, were conceived and implemented by Sacha Baron Cohen, who in his u...

Delightfully Wicked: Cheri

In Colette’s time, romance novels were actually good lit. Or, it was just that 50 novels written by her during her long and adventurous lif...

White on Rice Presented by Iyemon Cha

This bottled organic Japanese green tea, now distributed in the San Francisco Bay Area, made a splash way beyond tea-drinking culture on Tu...

Iyemon Cha Hosts World Premiere of White On Rice at San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival

The world premiere of director Dave Boyle’s film White on Rice will be hosted by Iyemon Cha Japanese Green Tea (www.IyemonChaEvents.com) at...

Paris 36 Opens in Theaters April 10

In the rich history of French cinema, only a few films are as memorable and poignant as The Chorus (Les Choristes, 2004), which was nominat...

A Girl Cut in Two—A Century-Old Story Told Anew

As the iconic 20th century filmmakers age, the theme of May-December romance inevitably marks their work. “A Girl Cut in Two” by Claude Chab...

I Served the King of England—A Filmmaker’s Take on Servility

A veteran Czech filmmaker, Jiri Menzel created this unsettling story of a little man in pursuit of happiness in the unhappiest times. The m...

The Unknown Woman—Hybrid of Italian Thriller and Post-Soviet Horror

What is marketed as an erotic mystery starts with a kind of a beauty contest between half-naked young women in masks, watched by a peeping T...

The Last Mistress Marked With French Filmmaker’s Signature Wild Streak

This cinematographically highly caloric film opens with a scene of pure gluttony, serving as an appetizer for a juicy main course society go...