The Year's Best Films
1. The Other Side of the Wind A long-coveted Holy Grail for cineastes, Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind finally dropped in 2018, 33 years after its maker’s death. Wind in many ways serves as a sort of semi-autobiographical bookend to Citizen Kane in ruthlessly dissecting a deeply flawed but high-pow... 
The Year's Best Films
1. The Florida Project Sean Baker’s follow-up to the stylish, street-level Tangerine is the sort of film that sticks with you, whether you like it or not. In part a tribute to The Little Rascals, The Florida Project works on that level alone, with a low... 
The Year's Best Films
1. Moonlight In skillfully adapting Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unproduced play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, writer-director Barry Jenkins shows a deep curiosity about one person’s development and inner life. We see this person grow from boy to teen... 
Thanks to prime mover Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, San Jose now has its own "Comic-Con": the Silicon Valley Comic Con. San Jose has been home to many science-fiction/film and TV/comic-themed toy shows or conventions over the years (many of us still have fond memories of TimeCon at the old San Jose Convention Center), some of them pretty rink... 
The Year's Best Films
1. Chi-Raq The right film at the right time, Spike Lee’s latest is his most creatively fertile and socially immediate narrative feature in years. A grabber from its opening sequence, a lyric video for Nick Cannon’s gut-punching... 
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By my count, this year's San Francisco International Film Festival (April 23-May 7, 2015) features 58 narrative features, one for every year in the fest's history. That's on top of 34 documentary features, 6 shorts programs, and a panoply of awards presentations/tributes, live performance events, lectu... 
The Year's Best Films
1. Boyhood The deceptively simple idea behind Richard Linklater's magnum opus was to shoot a few days a year for twelve years, and thus capture the growth and development of a middle-class Everyboy (Ellar Coltrane) and his family. Linklater's rest... 
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No one would say that the San Francisco Film Society has had an easy time of the last few years, but its Filmmaker360 program to support and fund independent film can (and does) boast successes like Beasts of the Southern Wild and Fruitvale Station, and with new Executive Director Noah Cowan in place, st... 
The Year's Best Films
1. Her The "zeitgeist"-y American movie of the year is a slightly futuristic tale that reflects blindingly on our present. Written and directed by Spike Jonze with elegant, melancholy calm, Her functions as a sincere and most unusual romance—between a human and a f... 
In the fall, a young film's fancy heavily turns to thoughts of awards. Long well-positioned as a harbinger of Oscar attention to come, the Mill Valley Film Festival brings out big films and big stars as part of an eclectic slate of studio and indie films, fiction films and documentaries, tributes and panels, a Childrens' Film Fest, concerts in the... 
The Year's Best Films
1. This is Not a Film This is the rare film that is more: a rebellious yawp over the rooftops of the world, a vital social document, a moral but illegal political statement. World-class filmmaker Jafar Panahi (Crimson Gold) has frequently tangled with the... 
In the last few years, leaps and bounds have taken The San Francisco Silent Film Festival to new heights of ambition and stature. The 17th San Francisco Silent Film Festival running July 12-15, 2012 at the Castro Theatre bears that out in what has been the institution's banner year thus far. The Fest topped itself with its historic presentation, ea... 
The exhibition runs from 11:00am-4:00pm daily; admission is $5 for SFMHS members and $10 for the general public. Tickets also remain available for the Standing Ovations benefit Thu 
The San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 19-May 3, and it's once again loaded up with intriguing international titles... 
The Year's Best Films
1. The Tree of Life No studio release this year was more ambitious, emotional, or elegant than The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick's searching epic about our place in a family, a town, a galaxy, the universe. Emmanuel Lubezki's innovative cinematography beautifully painted with light and shadow and color, while boy lead H... 
The Year's Best Films
1. Blue Valentine This master class in acting from the next generation of top talent (Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams) takes the pulse of modern love. With American divorce rates still hovering near 50%, few stories could be more wistfully relevant than this intimate look at the birth and death of love. First-time di... 
The Year's Best Narrative Films 1. Sita Sings the Blues Notice a theme here? 2009 was a banner year for animated films, and the most creative was this little charmer written, directed, produced, and animated by Nina Paley (it’s legally available for free online, but don’t be a cheapskate: make a donation or buy the DVD). Paley app... 
The Year's Best Films
1. Waltz with Bashir Waltz with Bashir works equally well as a potent anti-war film and as a creative examination of the nature of memory. Mature and possessed with significant psychological depth, Ari Folman’s animated film is an autobiographical documentary as much as it is anything else. Folman, unable to recon... 
Goosebump alert: the disc kicks off with one of the all-time great movie themes, the "Raiders March"...a magnificent, brassy piece of music. 
The definitive book on the Adam West Batman. 
Brilliant...essential reading on the modern myth of Batman, its meaning, and its enduring hold on the American imagination. 
Frank Miller revolutionized Batman (and arguably the comic-book industry) with the hugely successful graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns (1986), about an aged Batman. 
Batman in the 1970s took the lead of writer Dennis O'Neil and artist Neal Adams, who collectively drew the character back into complexity and strength... 
When Batman premiered on ABC in January 1966, everything changed for the Caped Crusader; the runaway hit sparked the first wave of Batman hysteria and—to many in the general public—branded Batman as a figure of camp for decades. 
Reinhart subjects each film to minute detail, providing complete cast lists, release information, elaborate plot summaries, historical context, critiques, and-in the case of the serials-chapter titles with individual release dates. 
Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's sequel to The Long Halloween dredges up unresolved issues between Batman, James Gordon (newly appointed police commissioner), and Harvey Dent. The disfigured Dent—once a D.A.—now walks the other side of the fine line of the law; sprung from his cell in Arkham Asylum, Dent calls himself Two-Face,... 
Certainly the most extraordinary Batman story ever devised, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth applies a Grand Guignol aesthetic and the theories of Carl Gustav Jung to a superstitious story on the border of consciousness and nightmare. On one level, Arkham Asylum can be taken as a very simple Batman story (the inmate... 
Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale got the attention of Batman fans with three Halloween tales (available in the single-volume Batman: Haunted Knight—The Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Specials). Not long thereafter, then-DC-editor Archie Goodwin suggested they collaborate on a Batman story that would pick up the gangsters from Fr... 
The 1991 trade paperback Batman: Tales of the Demon collects eleven of writer Dennis O'Neil's Rā's Al Ghūl stories from the pages of Batman and Detective Comics. Rā's Al Ghūl is Arabic for "the demon's head," and the character is Batman's most mysterious foe, wealthy mastermind of a criminal organization bent on... 
In 1986, writer Frank Miller and illustrator David Mazzucchelli dropped a bomb called Batman: Year One. A bona fide classic Batman story, Year One arguably tells the best kind of Batman story, one that's more concerned with gritty street reality and emotional turmoil than supervillains or needlessly ornate distractions. Mazzucchel... 
The lushly illustrated updated edition of Batman: The Ultimate Guide to the Dark Knight (published by Dorling Kindersley) employs dynamic graphics to tell the history of Batman, as per the sprawling, official canon that includes "well over 3,000 comic book appearances" and the influence of animated and live-action incarnations. Sc... 
A year or two before Batman, [Bob] Kane began collaborating with writer Bill Finger (1914-1974), now widely accepted as the unsung co-creator of Batman...Finger is now acknowledged as the creator of Robin, Alfred, Catwoman, Penguin, Two-Face and, eventual 
Batman Begins: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack 
The Art of Batman Begins 
The 5 books Christopher Nolan (director), Christian Bale (star), and David Goyer (screenwriter) cite as inspiration. 
It isn't mere hype to call this book "a must for every Batman fan's bookshelf"—any fan of the Batman comics, that is. 
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FESTIVAL DATES:
San Francisco: March 13-23, 2008 (primary venues: Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, Castro Theatre, Landmark Clay Theatre)
Berkeley: March 14-22, 2008 (venue: Pacific Film Archive)
San Jose: March 21-23, 2008 (venue: Camera 12 Cinema)
As ever, the San Francisco International Asian American F... 
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Cinequest is back! Rolling out another bold program--crammed with 70 narrative features, 14 documentary features, 8 programs of shorts, 17 special events, 41 Maverick Spirit Tributes, and, of course, a few parties--Cinequest offers the biggest little city of San Jose the film festival it deserves. The tr... 
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The San Francisco International Film Festival—the original American film festival—celebrates 50 years of excellence this year with a program that's filled to bursting with 108 features and 92 shorts; the star-studded guest list includes plenty of local heroes of cinema. This year's fest kicks... 
As always, SF Indiefest offers up an eclectic slate of eccentric flicks, starting with the Opening Night film Inland Empire. The latest from auteur filmmaker David Lynch, Inland Empire represents new directions for a man who has kept his independent spirit intact. It's his inaugural film on digital video (he says he'll never return to film), and it... 