Can you guys believe May is almost over?? Well June is just around the corner, and with it come several conventions and film festivals. But while we're still in May, we have several things to look forward to in the month's final weeks.
Firstly, A24's new film First Reformed arrives in the city at the Landmark Embarcadero Theatre and will begin its run this Thursday. On this same Thursday, the Yerba Buena begins one of their last curated and themed film series before their cinema department goes on a questionable hiatus. So if you've never been inside this renovated and stylized theatre, don't miss this chance!! This series is appropriately called Please Help Me I Am Droning: San Francisco's Dark Decade. This first of these films will be Gimme Shelter, which I recently found out is much more than a Rolling Stones documentary.
We end the week with two new releases, neither of which are currently listed on any theatre's calendars but will be available on VOD.
Firstly, A24's new film First Reformed arrives in the city at the Landmark Embarcadero Theatre and will begin its run this Thursday. On this same Thursday, the Yerba Buena begins one of their last curated and themed film series before their cinema department goes on a questionable hiatus. So if you've never been inside this renovated and stylized theatre, don't miss this chance!! This series is appropriately called Please Help Me I Am Droning: San Francisco's Dark Decade. This first of these films will be Gimme Shelter, which I recently found out is much more than a Rolling Stones documentary.
We end the week with two new releases, neither of which are currently listed on any theatre's calendars but will be available on VOD.
Opening This Week
Limited Theatres/ VOD Friday 25th (1hr 30min)
Horror (Rotten Tomatoes)
Your best friend has just been infected with a horrifying virus that will soon turn her into a rabid, rampaging cannibal-zombie. Do you: a) try to save her? or b) kill her before she kills you? That's the nightmarish scenario six students find themselves facing when their celebratory camping trip goes terrifyingly wrong. One by one, each falls victim to the feral disease, until only Alice and Jules two girlfriends testing the waters of their new relationship are left standing, armed with a shotgun and holed up in a remote cabin. They've got a hell of a fight before them if they hope to survive...
Limited Theatres/VOD Friday 25th (1hr 18min)
Horror (Rotten Tomatoes)
Megan cannot stop the nightmares. Her parents, Rob and Susan, are at their wit's end. When a couple from their small town in New York suggest Megan's soul may be the target of a soul-hungry demon, the family find themselves in a battle for Megan's life, and their own lives as well.
Terror Tuesday
Tuesday 22nd @ 10pm (1hr 47min)
Horror (Rotten Tomatoes)
Peter Medak's The Changeling is among a handful of films, including The Haunting (1963), Ghost Story (1981), and Lady in White (1988), that have successfully recreated the intimate, drawing-room atmosphere of supernatural horror fiction. After his wife and daughter are killed in a snowbound car accident, classical composer John Russell (George C. Scott) relocates from New York to Seattle to teach at his alma mater. Looking for a quiet place to rest and continue writing music, he is referred Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere) at the Seattle Historical Preservation Society. Claire shows John a large, sparsely furnished estate in the outlying countryside. He takes the house, appreciating its remoteness and the solitude it might afford, and diverts himself by renovating and settling in. He even starts to compose, putting aside his older work in favor of a new, sentimental piece for the piano. It is not long, however, before he begins having nightmares about the accident that killed his wife and daughter. Possibly because of this trauma, he is open to communications from the house's ghostly occupant
Weird Wednesday
Wednesday 23rd @ 10pm (2hrs)
Art House/ Comedy/ Drama (RottenTomatoes)
Writer and director Anna Biller takes a swingin' look back at sexploitation cinema of the '70s in this candy-colored comedy drama. Barbi (Anna Biller) is a beautiful but blasé suburban housewife whose handsome mate, Rick (Chad England), is more interested in his career than in quenching his wife's sensual thirsts. When up-and-coming actor Mark (Jared Sanford) and his open-minded wife, Sheila (Bridget Brno), move in next door, Barbi discovers they're more than willing to help her find the thrills she's been missing. Before long, Mark and Sheila part company, and when Rick finds out about Barbi's extramarital dalliances, he walks out on her. Free to do as she pleases, Barbi changes her name to Viva and teams up with Sheila to join the front lines of the sexual revolution, enjoying assignations with a dizzying variety of partners, including hipster artist Clyde (Marcus DeAnda), psychedelic naturalist Elmer (Paolo Davanza), experimental theater advocate Arthur (John Klemantaski), glamorous lesbian model Agnes (Robbin Ryan), and sexually ambiguous hair stylist Sherman (Barry Morse). But will Viva's appetite for the ecstatic lead her into dangerous and unexpected places? Viva received the "Best of Fest" award at the 2007 Boston Underground Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
AniMonday
Monday 21st @ 7:30pm (1hr 29min)
Animation/ Drama/ War (IMDB)
Grave of the Fireflies opens on an evening in 1945, after Japan's surrender at the end of World War II; and in a train station, the young Seita dies alone. The rest of the movie tells us, in flashback, how things have come to this. Seita and Setsuko are two young Japanese children growing up in the waning days of World War II. Much to Seita's pride, their father is in the Japanese navy, and they live fairly content lives in Kobe despite rationing and the other privations of war. When their mother dies from burns suffered during an American fire-bombing raid, a distant aunt takes them in -- and conflict eventually forces the children to try to survive on their own. At first, Seita and his little sister enjoy their idyllic lives in the country, but harsh reality eventually settles in as Seita begins to understand the difficulties of taking care of a young child when both food and compassion are scarce. ~ Emru Townsend, Rovi
Opens Thursday 24th @ 7:15pm & 9:30pm (1hr 48min)
Screening All Day Friday 25th
Drama/ Thriller (IMDB)
Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) is a solitary, middle-aged parish pastor at a small Dutch Reform church in upstate New York on the cusp of celebrating its 250th anniversary. Once a stop on the Underground Railroad, the church is now a tourist attraction catering to a dwindling congregation, eclipsed by its nearby parent church, Abundant Life, with its state-of-the-art facilities and 5,000-strong flock. When a pregnant parishioner (Amanda Seyfried) asks Reverend Toller to counsel her husband, a radical environmentalist, the clergyman finds himself plunged into his own tormented past, and equally despairing future, until he finds redemption in an act of grandiose violence. From writer-director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver; American Gigolo; Affliction) comes a gripping thriller about a crisis of faith that is at once personal, political, and planetary.
Screening All Week (1hr 32min)
Crime/ Drama/ Thriller (IMDB)
Jim Carrey commands the screen in this spellbinding thriller from Executive Producers of The Revenant and Black Mass. When police officer Tadek (Carrey) finds similarities between an unsolved murder and a crime outlined in a book by famed writer Krystov Kozlov, Tadek begins to track Kozlov and his girlfriend, a mysterious sex-club worker (Charlotte Gainsbourg). As his obsession with Kozlov grows, Tadek descends into a deadly underworld of sex, lies, and corruption to find the shocking, deadly truth.
Opens Friday 25th (1hr 48min)
Action/ Thriller (IMDB)
Jen (fearlessly embodied by Matilda Lutz, Rings) is enjoying a romantic getaway with her wealthy boyfriend which is suddenly disrupted when his sleazy friends arrive for an unannounced hunting trip. Tension mounts in the house until the situation abruptly--and viciously--intensifies, culminating in a shocking act that leaves Jen left for dead. Unfortunately for her assailants, Jen survives and reemerges with a relentless, wrathful intent: revenge. A white-knuckle tale of transgression and transformation, REVENGE gloriously blurs the lines of vengeance and survival while simultaneously delivering a ferocious dissection of gender and genre.
Scarlet Diva (2000)
Friday 25th @ 8:45pm (1hr 30min)
Drama/ Erotic Google)
Shot on digital video, this no-holds-barred, semi-autobiographical film from Italian actress/model Asia Argento presents the bleak decent of a popular actress into a haze of drugs and overindulgence. Anna Battista (Argento) has seemingly everything anyone could ever want, yet sometimes everything is never enough. Fed up with going through the motions as an actor, Battista aspires to seek a career as a director so that she may truly explore her currently latent artistic talent. The queen of excess, Battista's attempts to realize her true talent are time and again shattered as the she is used and abused by everyone she comes into contact with. After a one-night fling with an emotionally distant and uncaring Australian rock star (Jean Sheperd) leaves the self-confessed whore a lovelorn mother-to-be, Battista's desperation to bring her story to the screen finds her dealing with a shady American producer (Joe Coleman), an agent reluctant to assist her in branching out, and a heroin-addicted former filmmaker who is as close to ending his life as Battista is to beginning hers. Her career in disarray and her uncertain future growing increasingly grim, Battista embarks on a numbing binge of sex and drugs that takes her from Europe to America and back again. Attempting to seek-out the father of her unborn child and find some sense of stability, Battista finds the truth about her one-time lover.
Double Feature
Cape Fear (1962)
Wednesday 23rd & Thursday 24th @ 7:30pm (1hr 46min)
Drama/ Horror/ Thriller (IMDB)
After an eight-year prison term for rape and assault, Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) is set free. Immediately making a beeline to Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck), the former prosecutor responsible for Cady's conviction, Cady laconically informs Sam that he intends to "pay back" the attorney for his years behind bars. Conducting a meticulous campaign of terror, Cady is careful to stay within the law. Sam, realizing that Cady intends to wreak vengeance by raping the attorney's wife (Polly Bergen) and daughter (Lori Martin), tries to put the ex-criminal behind bars, but has no grounds to do so. Chief Dutton (Martin Balsam) tries to help Sam with a few strong-arm tactics, but succeeds only in having the courts take Cady's side in the matter. Things come to a head when Sam moves his family to the "safety" of a remote houseboat on Cape Fear river. Cady shows up unannounced and is about to ravage Bowden's wife and daughter and when Sam turns the tables. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
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Desperate Hours (1955)
Wednesday 23rd & Thursday 24th @ 5:25pm & 9:30pm (1hr 52min)
Crime/ Drama/ Noir (IMDB)
Based on the novel and play by Joseph Hayes, which in turn was inspired by an actual event, The Desperate Hours is the prototypical "family-trapped-by-criminals" drama. Escaped convicts Humphrey Bogart, Robert Middleton and Dewey Martin, seeking an appropriate hideout until they can make contact with their money supply, deliberately choose the suburban home of Fredric March and his family. The cold-blooded Bogart wants no trouble with the police, and he knows he can cower a family with children into cooperating with him.
Thurday 24th @ 7:30pm (1hr 31min)
Documentary/ Music/ Thriller (IMDB)
A harrowing documentary of the Stones' 1969 tour, with much of the focus on the tragic concert at Altamont.
Friday 25th @ 7:30pm (1hr 48min)
Biography/ Drama (IMDB)
In this docudrama, Natasha Richardson plays Patty Hearst, the heiress to her family newspaper fortune who was kidnapped and allegedly brainwashed by members of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). She is blindfolded and stuffed into a closet for 57 days and subjected to the philosophies of her SLA captors. She is later offered her freedom but elects to join the group, and Hearst and the gang proceed to go on a rampage of well-publicized bank robberies. Since the story is told from the point of view of the victim -- from her book -- the feature attempts to portray her plight sympathetically. Was she the victim of ruthless political extremists or a spoiled rich girl playing out her counterculture fantasies? The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Twenty years after the kidnapping, her SLA counterparts were still in jail while Hearst, married with children, made the rounds of television talk shows. She is perceived as someone whose incredible financial resources kept her from prison, and her stories of being the terrorized victim are unconvincing at best.
-Huntress
