By Richard von Busack
Beautiful and doomed, the denizens of the two week retrospective at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater carry out their appointed fates: victims spared from the American movie industry’s insistence on the punished villain …

By Richard von Busack
IF The Avengers featured British pensioners, it would be The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. (Best Exotic Marigold Hotel tickets and showtimes here.)  Senior citizens deserve this reward; they’re good and faithful moviegoers. …

By Richard von Busack
It didn’t live fast, but Dark Shadows (Dark Shadows tickets and showtimes here) leaves a beautiful corpse. The clown-white makeup on the haunted Collins family alone gives this pulseless reboot the look …

By Richard von Busack
You can recognize the shape of the Canadian Oscar nominee Monsieur Lazhar (showtimes and tickets here) at 500 yards. It follows the pattern of legions of films from Goodbye Mr Chips to …

By Richard von Busack
Joss Whedon’s simply colossal The Avengers (The Avengers tickets and showtimes here) applauds the beauty of cooperation. Not such a stupid idea, considering what the lack of it is doing to our …

Has the world suffered enough from pirates? In one of the best jokes in The Pirates! Band of Misfits (showtimes here) a crewmember observes, “You can’t just say ‘arrr’ and make everything better.’
This …

by Richard von Busack
One of the most exciting films of 2012 finally arrives in Santa Cruz at the Nickelodeon: Ralph Fiennes’ version of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (other locations besides Santa Cruz here.). This obscurer play has …

(Opens Apr 27 at the AMC Metreon 16 in San Francisco and the AMC Cupertino 16 in Cupertino.)
By Richard von Busack
Likely you’ve heard the Tolstoi parable about how when a person goes to heaven, God …

By Richard von Busack
There comes a point in watching a modern-made, post Private Ryan war movie where you wonder what you’re supposed to be feeling. The explosions and bullet-ballets shake you into an ADD state. …

By Richard von Busack
“If we could tell a film, why make a film?” That’s the question in This Is Not A Film, opening for a week long run at the SF Film Society Cinema in …