This week sees something rare these days in SF: The addition of new film venues, after years of their number shrinking. Well, actually the theaters in question aren’t new—just returning to action after a hiatus of one sort of another. Japantown’s New People, an event space whose past functions included a too-brief stint as SFFilm’s year-round arthouse, appears to be at least temporarily back in the exhibition business with “Nippon Vibes” (Sat/14 and Sun/15), a weekend of Japanese cinema co-presented by the Roxie.

Its four shows span eight decades, from the original 1954 Godzilla (quite a different movie from the drastically altered U.S. release version) and Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 Throne of Blood (an ambitious feudal-era spin on Macbeth) to the beloved 2016 anime your name. and last year’s Kokuho, an epic three-hour drama set in the Kabuki theater world that’s now the highest-grossing Japanese live action feature ever.

More conspicuous has been the re-opening of the Castro Theatre, whose controversial makeover as a venue primarily for live performance was negotiated with a proviso that it also regularly host a minimum number of film-centric events. After many months of renovation, last week saw the public invited in again with a screening of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. There won’t be much more of a celluloid nature until mid-March, when the calendar starts to include special nights for local film festivals, celebrity appearances (John Waters with Serial Mom, Gina Gershon with Showgirls), sing-a-longs (The Sound of Music), 70mm presentations (Interstellar), and so forth. The full calendar is here.

This Thu/12, however, the Castro will house local premiere for Pillion, with director Harry Lighton and star Harry Melling in person, followed by a party at The Stud. Melling plays Colin, a dweeby gay man who still lives with his supportive-if-hover-y parents, sings in his father’s (Douglas Hodge) barbershop quartet, and has perhaps the day job least likely to generate a social life: he issues parking tickets. Then by chance, he crosses paths with Ray (Alexander Skarsgard), a strapping biker. Rather unexpectedly, this imposing hunk drafts Colin as his new… slave? Sub? Houseboy? Whatever the appropriate term, it’s a relationship with strict if often unspoken rules and bounds. Our hero finds it exhilarating, but also frustrating. Colin remains a closed book in emotional terms, forbiddingly “discreet” about even such fundamentals as what he does for a living.

I was not a big fan of Box Hill, the Adam Mars-Jones novel this is based on. Lighton’s debut-feature adaptation maintains some of the book’s cringey aspects, but also adds humor and grace notes. This is, at times, surprisingly graphic in sexual content for a relatively mainstream film, though shock value (and even eroticism) are downplayed in favor of character insight. There’s also an interesting subplot of sorts in the bewilderment of Colin’s ailing mother (Lesley Sharp) at seeing her son find a “boyfriend” at last, albeit on role-playing fetish terms she doesn’t understand or like.

That Castro screening was officially sold out at press time; however, Pillion opens in limited local theaters the following day. Fri/13 will also see the wide release of another volatile love story, the latest adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring no less than Barbie (well, Margot Robbie) and Frankenstein’s monster (Jacob Elordi)—but that film was not advance-screened in time for our deadline.

Other movies arriving this weekend run an interesting gamut of less-starry titles that range from foreign cinema in a classic neorealist vein to a political documentary, plus several unconventional fantasy or genre films.

The President’s Cake

Sponsored link

Probably the best movie opening this week is one that might recall the postwar Italian depictions of child poverty in movies like The Bicycle Thief. Hasan Hadi’s debut feature is set in 1990 Iraq, when U.N. sanctions have thrown citizens into considerable everyday hardship. Nonetheless, it is mandatory that the entire nation celebrate Saddam Hussein’s birthday, with nine-year-old rural schoolchild Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) “winning” the dubious honor of making her classroom’s honorary cake. This is in fact a terrible stroke of luck, because such basics as sugar, eggs, and flour are in extremely short supply—yet the punitive consequences for failing this stupid obligation will be no joke.

Helped as best she can by her grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), Lamia sets out on her near-impossible quest, providing us a fascinating glimpse of an unfamiliar time and place, made more so by their community of floating houses on marshland. Compellingly performed by mostly nonprofessional actors, very well crafted on an often impressive scale, it’s a depressing-sounding story that somehow sports too much warmth, color, and suspense to come off as a simple downer. It did not, alas, make it to the Oscars’ final five of current Best International Feature nominees—though it should have. Cake opens in Bay Area theaters including SF’s AMC Metreon this Fri/13.

A Poet

In contrast to Lamia’s innocence and industry, there’s the Rumpelstiltskin-like character played by Ubeimar Rios in this Cannes Jury Prize winner from Colombian writer-director Simon Mesa Soto. Oscar won a prize for poetry in his youth, but now he’s a middle-aged crank still living with his elderly mother, jobless, friendless, boozy, and obnoxious. Forced by an irate sibling to take a teaching job, he’s surprised to discover his class of bored Medellín teens harbors a quiet girl living in bleak circumstances (Rebecca Andrade as Yurlady) who pens poems in secret—and they’re good. An unlikely mentorship develops, though when Yurlady is introduced to the literary world as a bright young talent, Oscar discovers that while his colleagues are eager to claim credit for her “discovery,” they’re equally quick to blame him once things take an unfortunate turn.

This is largely a black comedy of sorts, with our anti-hero a memorably hapless, unsympathetic, and unattractive figure—a bit redolent of the repulsively vainglorious Ignatius T. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. But he does rise to the occasion of doing good when given a chance, and there is a certain bittersweet poignancy to the way that ultimately does/doesn’t work out. (As the saying goes, Oscar finds that no good deed goes unpunished.) A Poet is a relatively small story. Still, it traverses a wide arc, starting out as caustic satire, finally arriving at an understated depth and tenderness. It opens Fri/13 at the Roxie Theater.

An American Pastoral

In early 2023 a French film crew visited Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, where all five school board seats then held by moderate (as opposed to far-right) Republicans were up for election. In this very conservative area, no Democrats held office, though they duly campaigned. You can guess what happened: Whipped into states of hysteria by the phantom menaces of “gender ideology” and supposed “porn” on children’s bookshelves (though notably no one claiming that ever names an actual tome), voters replaced the incumbents with extremists so unified, they all belonged to the same batshit local evangelical church.

These are people who firmly believe the public schools they’ll be in charge of are “government brainwash camps,” that the 2020 presidential election being “stolen” is “a fact,” and so forth. (Some of them were even January 6 attendees.) We see a men’s group watch a video that uses Forrest Gump to promote Christian militancy; a woman’s gun instructional class; a minister decrying those who disagree with his rather un-Christ-like doctrine as “vermin.” Book banning is just the tip of the iceberg on this aggressive activist sector’s wish list—you can imagine democracy itself on the chopping block soon enough.

Though it’s taken its time getting released in the United States where it was shot, Auberi Edler’s 2024 documentary remains alarmingly relevant—a scrupulously neutral gaze at Americans so indoctrinated they have no idea they represent an extreme, and who are now driving national policy. The ironically named Pastoral is available via VOD and Digital streaming from Film Movement as of Fri/13.

Mad Flights: ‘Good Luck,’ ‘Nirvanna,’ ‘Cold Storage,’ ‘Sweetness’

On a mercifully more escapist plane, four new releases offer above-average flights of fantasy, fun, and fans-gone-wild. Two are surprisingly elaborate exercises in absurdist humor, toying with the time-space continuum in ways that might recall Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is the first film in a decade from director Gore Verbinski, since his run of commercial successes (notably the Pirates of the Caribbean films) ended with a couple expensive flops (The Lone Ranger, A Cure For Wellness). It starts out like the famous scene in Pulp Fiction, where a large L.A. diner is held hostage at gunpoint. But this sketchy-looking perp (Sam Rockwell) isn’t demanding anything as basic as “your money or your life.” Instead, he insists he’s from “a future that is totally, completely fucked,” and needs to recruit fellow “revolutionaries” from the diners so “Humanity can be saved” before that future becomes inevitable.

The rest of Matthew Robinson’s episodic script gives us backstory on his reluctant new allies, while moving forward through an increasingly preposterous adventure that ends in a riot of CGI effects. En route, you may recognize nods to or elements of The Stepford Wives, zombie movies, Pixar ‘toons, Idiocracy, even the Brothers Quay. It’s a freewheeling yet cleverly constructed comic phantasmagoria whose core message is serious: All this reality-distancing stuff we’re allowing to happen now (in particular AI technology) will have catastrophic consequences in the long-term. This is a splashy popcorn flick fanboy types are gonna love. But even even those of us normally less susceptible to such things will have to admit it’s selling a very high grade of popcorn.

Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is a big-screen extension of the cult Canadian TV show he and co-writer Jay McCarrol starred in. They’re back as themselves—sorta: childhood friends turned adult collaborators on a musical act that so far has gotten them absolutely nowhere. Nonetheless, hope springs eternal. So after a parachuting stunt off Toronto’s CN Tower doesn’t go as planned, Matt hits upon a new path to fame, involving time travel. Jay dismisses that as delusional… yet somehow it does work, transporting them back to 2008, where they spy upon their younger selves. Of course getting back to the present-day without causing a giant mess turns out to be very, very complicated.

This film will no doubt have more resonance for those familiar with its prior, small-screen incarnations. But it’s still funny and ingenious enough to win over newbies like myself, its inside-joke referencing towards earlier jumbo fantasy mallflicks (especially the Back to the Future trilogy) rising to impressive heights of ironical spoof-slash-homage. (McCarrol’s completely straightforward Big Orchestral Score, out-John Williamsing John Williams, is the perfect complement to that sotto voce satire.) Nostalgic millennials are the ideal target audience, but it’s a testament to the collaborators’ wit that Tail-End Boomer me had a very good time, too. Both Good Luck and Nirvanna arrive in theaters nationwide Fri/13.

Also cleverly mixing comedy, action, and sci-fi-ish fantasy is Jonny Campbell’s David Koepp-penned Cold Storage, which opens with the discovery that debris from the space station Skylab’s 1979 disintegration has had a calamitous effect on an outback town in Western Australia. The contagion is contained by NASA personnel, its surviving evidence stored in a high-security U.S. military facility back home.

Years later, however, that eastern Kansas facility is no more—now the site is just a commercial storage facility, open 24/7, its current operators clueless about the alien menace buried deep within. Naturally, this will be the evening that “parasitic fungus” finally gets loose. Joe Keery from Stranger Things and Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell play employees in for some unpleasant surprises; Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville are retired government agents called back into action by the emergency. There are some colorful supporting characters, including—quite inexplicably—a small, rather nondescript role for Vanessa Redgrave.

With its droll performances, sharp presentation, and amusing individual ideas, Storage (another Fri/13 theatrical release) gets so close to being excellent, it’s disappointing that it never quite kicks into the highest gear we expect. Still: It is definitely fun, even while falling short of memorable.

Closer to straight thrillerdom, though with a unmistakable streak of grotesque humor, is Emma Higgins’ Sweetness. Her mother dead, her cop father (Justin Chatwin) tiptoeing around his only child’s hostile moods, Rylee (Kate Hallett) is a bitter bundle of teenage goth angst who’s alternately bullied and ignored by peers save sole friend Sidney (Aya Furukawa). Her churning emotions get channeled into obsessing over emo-pop band Floorplan, in particular their pretty-boy singer Payton (Herman Tommeraas).

After attending a concert, circumstances unexpectedly land her in his car, where he repeatedly nods out at the wheel—turns out this purportedly in-recovery rock star is actually still very much using. That (plus dad’s convenient weekend absence) places Payton at her disposal, and she isn’t about to let him go. Claiming to a skeptical Sidney that she’s simply helping him kick the habit, Rylee keeps her glam captive handcuffed to a bed, then a basement pipe.

Needless to say, this adolescent-fangirl version of Misery isn’t going to end well. Payton may be increasingly resourceful in his desperation, but we soon grasp Rylee is… well, quite precociously crazy for her age. Canadian Sweetness is slick and well-cast. Still, we’ve seen numerous variations on its like in recent years, and this particular effort heads towards closing ironies as predictable as they are trite. It releases to On Demand platforms Fri/13.