{"id":388162,"date":"2026-07-06T18:10:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T18:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/388162\/"},"modified":"2026-07-06T18:10:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T18:10:11","slug":"screen-grabs-famous-artists-choose-their-favorite-flick-and-you-can-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/388162\/","title":{"rendered":"Screen Grabs: Famous artists choose their favorite flick (and you can watch)"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s an inevitable fascination to hearing from artists what predecessors they were influenced by, or what contemporaries they find inspiring. It\u2019s not unusual for a filmmaker to be given an opportunity to curate an evening or a series of films that influenced them. But it\u2019s unusual for that kind of programming to happen between different media, which is one thing that makes the\u00a0Fraenkel Film Festival<\/a>\u00a0so intriguing. Now in its third year, again at SF\u2019s Roxie Theater, the annual event lets visual artists not normally associated with cinema\u2014most of them tied to the Fraenkel Gallery, founded in 1979 with a then-primary emphasis on the art of photography\u2014select a movie that particularly impacted them and their work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The expanded 2026 edition opens this Wed\/8 with Swiss-American multimedia veteran Christian Marclay\u2019s choice: Brian De Palma\u2019s\u00a0Carrie, the first, and arguably still best, screen adaptation of a Stephen King novel, originally released in our nation\u2019s Bicentennial year. (An occasion that didn\u2019t seem all that great at the time, but sure looks good in retrospect, at the present moment.) Other choices by esteemed artists will be almost equally familiar to many: There\u2019s Bergman\u2019s 1966 psychological puzzle\u00a0Persona\u00a0(picked by Robert Adams), Hitchcock\u2019s peak adventure thriller\u00a0North by Northwest\u00a0(Lee Friedlander), iconic anime\u00a0Princess Mononoke\u00a0(Martine Guttierez) and family favorite\u00a0The Princess Bride\u00a0(Elisheva Biernoff). Plus cult classics\u00a0Grey Gardens\u00a0(Sophie Calle),\u00a0The Warriors\u00a0(Wardell Milan) and\u00a0Withnail & I (Richard Learoyd).\u00a0<\/p>\n

The selections reach as far back as Jean Renoir\u2019s 1939\u00a0The Rules of the Game\u00a0(Nicholas Nixon) and Samuel Fuller\u2019s brassy 1953 noir\u00a0Pickup on South Street\u00a0(Nan Goldin); as recent as Spike Jonze\u2019s 2013 sci-fi drama\u00a0Her\u00a0(Richard Misrach) and Jordan Peele\u2019s 2017 horror hit\u00a0Get Out\u00a0(Carrie Mae Weems). Arthouse auteurs are represented in quantity, including Almodovar with\u00a0Law of Desire\u00a0(Liz Deschenes), Resnais\u2019\u00a0Hiroshima Mon Amour\u00a0(Kota Ezawa), Tarkovsky\u2019s\u00a0Solaris\u00a0(Adam Fuss), Chabrol\u2019s\u00a0La Ceremonie\u00a0(Katy Grannan), and Jarmusch\u2019s\u00a0Mystery Train\u00a0(Alec Soth). The latter is among a handful of films shown in 35mm prints, alongside Alan Pakula\u2019s 1971\u00a0Klute, a chilly proto-Watergate paranoia thriller. It won Jane Fonda her first Oscar, as a Manhattan call girl drawn by detective Donald Sutherland into a missing-person case.<\/p>\n

A couple of the festival\u2019s selections will likely be new to most viewers. Hiroshi Sugimoto\u2019s choice\u00a0The Face of Another, originally released in 1966, was one of four collaborations that decade between Japanese novelist Kobo Abe and director Hiroshi Teshigahara. 1962\u2019s\u00a0Woman in the Dunes\u00a0was by far their most successful internationally, but this equally enigmatic, Kafkaesque B&W narrative has its own strange fascination. It depicts a man (Tatsuya Nakadai) who\u2019s disfigured in an industrial accident, then exhibits increasingly disturbing behavior once a doctor outfits him with a remarkably convincing facial mask.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Richard T. Walker\u2019s pick\u00a0Happy as Lazzaro\u00a0is from Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher, whose prior\u00a0The Wonders\u00a0and subsequent La Chimera were both more widely seen than this 2018 feature. But it\u2019s a work of compelling originality, in which a community of peasants labor practically as slaves on a tobacco farm that was fully isolated from the mainland by floodwaters decades prior. They\u2019re so ignorant, they don\u2019t realize their sharecropper-type servitude to an aristocratic\u00a0padrona\u00a0(Nicoletta Braschi) has been illegal for years. Most innocently cheerful about this endless toil is young Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo), an angelic naif. At this story\u2019s halfway point, however, both his and the community\u2019s fortunes take a drastic turn, and what had been a sort of lyrical rural comedy becomes a harsh (if still imaginatively heightened) sketch of up-to-the-moment deprivation on society\u2019s margins.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In addition to the 20 movies showing through Sat\/18, the Frankel Film Festival will also host a panel entitled \u201cEverything You Wanted to Know About the SF Art World\u201d on Sat\/11 at 3:45 pm, featuring reps from several local galleries concurrently showing in the Fraenkel\u2019s collaborative exhibit \u201cA Slice of the Pie\u201d (more info on the show here<\/a>). For a full schedule and other info on the Roxie series, go here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Roxie also has a couple unrelated revivals on tap starting this weekend. There\u2019s a 40th anniversary re-release of\u00a0Sherman\u2019s March, which put documentarian Ross McElwee and a particular brand of humorously very personal nonfiction cinema on the map, three years before\u00a0Roger & Me. Subtitled \u201cA Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation,\u201d it\u2019s an exercise in drawling absurdism\u2014balancing awkward diaristic confession with a distinctively North Carolinan cultural snapshot. Its return (opening Fri\/10) offers a prelude to the same director\u2019s new\u00a0Remake, a much more somber piece\u2014generated by the death of McElwee\u2019s troubled son\u2014that arrives in local theaters later this month.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Infinitely sillier is a more obscure Eighties nugget, Icaro Martins and Jose Antonio Garcia\u2019s\u00a0Onda Nova\u00a0aka\u00a0New Wave. Comparable to such US drive-in softcore skinflicks around the same time as\u00a0H.O.T.S.,\u00a0Spring Break,\u00a0and Hardbodies, it\u2019s superficially about a first women\u2019s soccer team being formed in Sao Paolo after a long ban. But mostly it\u2019s about the team members and their friends stripping down and making out at every opportunity, in every combination. (Though there\u2019s no man-on-man action till near the end.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sponsored link<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

High on bodily friction if short on narrative conflict, the film has much full-frontal nudity\u2014yes, for both men and women\u2014a parental figure played by a guy in drag, a very synthy soundtrack, kitschy club performances, and songs by global stars (Bowie, Nina Hagen) that the filmmakers probably didn\u2019t have the rights to. Given the amount of lesbian frolicking on display, you\u2019d expect homophobia to be a plot element. Oddly, it\u2019s not\u2014but off-screen, the military dictatorship compensated by promptly banning the movie for \u201camorality.\u201d It became an underground cult item over the years. This 4K restoration finally gives it an official introduction to viewers who will be amused and\/or titillated by its frivolity, but should also be a bit amazed as the sheer\u00a0chutzpah\u00a0of its creation in 1983. The Roxie\u2019s scheduled playdates are here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Such (or any) movies don\u2019t magically preserve themselves. You can get a peek at the process by which a lucky few are kept alive for new generations via BAMPFA\u2019s \u201cFilm Preservationist Ross Lipman in Person\u201d program this week. For three days, Thurs\/9-Sat\/11, the Los Angeles-based author, restorationist and filmmaker will present projects he\u2019s overseen. All of them are treasures from the annals of American independent cinema: Barbara Loden\u2019s sole directorial feature, the 1970 working-class character drama\u00a0Wanda; Rob Epstein\u2019s seminal chapter in LGBTQ history, 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk; and Kent Mackenzie\u2019s 1961 fiction\/nonfiction hybrid\u00a0The Exiles, a remarkable memento of a subterranean Native American community living in L.A.\u2019s now-erased Bunker Hill neighborhood.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lipman will also deliver the multimedia lecture-presentation \u201cCrossroads and the Exploding Digital Inevitable,\u201d in which he provides artistic and historical context for Bruce Conner\u2019s\u00a0Crossroads. That incredible 1976 short, compiling US governmental footage of atomic bomb tests, which will be screened as well. Full info on the series is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

New movies of note:<\/p>\n

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World<\/p>\n

Poetry fans will rejoice at this tribute to the late Pulitzer and National Book Award winner. Inspired from an early age by nature and Walt Whitman, she\u00a0used her medium to convey a \u201csense of rapture\u201d whose lack of overt politics or personal disclosure wasn\u2019t always in critical fashion. But for some time it made her the art form\u2019s most popular practitioner in the US. Sasha Waters\u2019 documentary finds the subject called \u201cvery famous yet completely elusive,\u201d with many devoted readers long unaware she was a lesbian\u2014let alone one in a 40-year domestic partnership, with photographer Molly Malone. When the latter passed away in 2005, Oliver surprised her audience by eschewing something \u201cvery close to a hermit\u2019s life\u201d for a much more public role, largely lured out by her journalist friend Maria Schriver.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For all her privacy, Oliver also moved in somewhat starry circles, from an early job with Edna St. Vincent Millay\u2019s estate to later association with Norman Mailer, plus a longterm friendship with John Waters (who, as usual, gives great interview here). Poets acknowledging her influence here encompass Mark Doty, Major Jackson, V (nee Eve Ensler), Donika Kelly, and Nick Flynn, while among featured onscreen readers from her work are Steve Buscemi, Helena Bonham Carter, and Stephen Colbert. Some pedestrian musical choices aside, this\u00a0American Masters\u00a0presentation does justice to a scribe whose poems \u201cspeak the language of the soul,\u201d as no less a fan than Oprah claims. It opens Fri\/10 at SF\u2019s Opera Plaza Cinemas and Marin\u2019s Smith Rafael Film Center, then Thurs\/16 at the Roxie Theater.<\/p>\n

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve liked movies by director David Wain, though only two\u2014teen sex comedy spoof\u00a0Wet Hot American Summer\u00a0and Paul Rudd-Seann William Scott vehicle\u00a0Role Models\u2014seem to have been liked by anybody\u00a0else. Often writing in tandem with fellow alumni of sketch comedy group The State, his is an improv-derived humor that\u2019s familiarly snarky but also a little anarchic, with surreal digressions that can be inspired\u2026or fall flat. Most recent small-screen effort\u00a0They Came Together, a romcom sendup, was on the flattish side, a disappointment given the talent involved. The same goes for this new collaboration with cowriter Ken Marino, a modern-day\u00a0Wizard of Oz\u00a0spin with a host of celebrity cameos. Still, I can\u2019t say I disliked it. Their sensibility is at least kind-of-amusing even when it\u2019s not actually\u00a0funny,\u00a0or the cheerfully unpredictable ideas don\u2019t quite work.<\/p>\n

Gail (Zoey Deutch) is an uber-perky, wholesome hairdresser in smalltown Kansas who\u2019s about to marry high school sweetheart Tom (Michael Cassidy)\u2014former head cheerleader weds former starting quarterback, natch. They jokingly ponder which famous person they\u2019d each \u201cdo\u201d if given a \u201cfree pass\u201d to cheat just once. Then, unfortunately, Tom actually does meet (and meat) his chosen crush object Jennifer Aniston, gamely playing herself. Having assumed this game was purely theoretical, Gail sobs off in a pique to a hairdressing conference in Los Angeles with gay coworker Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley).<\/p>\n

Upon arrival, they\u2019re so stunned by an immediate star sighting (Henry Winkler) that they mistakenly switch cases at the airport with some stereotypical wiseguy types in the employ of a ruthless dragon lady (Sabrina Impacciatore). She is irked to learn the items expected have been lost, so she dispatches more goombas to retrieve them, as violently as possible. Meanwhile a psychic reader informs our heroine that the only way to re-achieve balance in her life is to fuck her\u00a0own\u00a0celebrity crush. Thus the hunt is on for Jon Hamm, a bullet-dodging quest that acquires helpmates in the form of a CAA flunky (Ben Wang), a washed-up paparazzo (Marino), and Hamm\u2019s erstwhile\u00a0Mad Men\u00a0costar John Slattery.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is all extremely silly, a sustained goof that is never dull\u2026 yet never hilarious, either. It\u2019s one of those films you guess was probably a joy for everyone involved to make, though somehow that delight doesn\u2019t fully translate for the viewer. Why? Who knows. Comedy is hard, its workings mysterious. Nonetheless,\u00a0Gail Daughtry\u00a0is diverting\u2014and it will probably play better with an audience than it did being solo-watched by me. It opens in theaters nationwide Fri\/10.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Travel Is Broadening: Spanish \u2018Romeria,\u2019 Turkish \u2018Burning Days\u2019<\/p>\n

Two films newly released in the US offer very different fish-out-of-water narratives, both setting their protagonists to sort out puzzles that prove hazardous\u2014sometimes emotionally, sometimes physically. Carla Simon\u2019s\u00a0Romeria\u00a0(which opens Fri\/10 at the Roxie) is, like her prior\u00a0Summer 1993\u00a0and\u00a0Alcarras, a family story. But for orphaned Marina (Llucia Garcia Mitch), who was raised by relatives on her mother\u2019s side, meeting her father\u2019s relations is an entirely new experience. As she\u2019s just turned 18, a legal glitch requires their consent in applying for university scholarships. So she traipses off on a vacation where she joins grandparents, an aunt, and various cousins in what\u2019s largely a festive seaside visit, on the water and off. These strangers are all ostensibly welcoming. But there are odd, discomfiting notes, arguments Marina overhears and truths that contradict what she\u2019s always been told about her long-dead parents.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the film\u2019s last lap, Simon (apparently drawing on a real-life family past) lets the storytelling rewind a couple decades to reveal just what happened. That slightly phantasmagorical flashback is torrid and tragic, portraying two reckless lovers whose demises were scandalous enough to be kept secret. But do they need to remain so? This seemingly blithe, then involving, then meaningful film works its way to a fadeout in which the past can at last be dragged into the sun, lighting a path for new generations no longer burdened by shame.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Veteran Turkish writer-director Emin Alper\u2019s\u00a0Burning Days\u00a0is a co-production with France that is actually from 2022 (he\u2019s made another acclaimed film since, this year\u2019s\u00a0Salvation), but is getting its first real U.S. release now on streaming platform Metrograph at Home<\/a>. Emre (Selahattin Pasali) is a boyish young lawyer newly appointed to a rural area as state prosecutor. He\u2019s a by-the-book type who quickly realizes that dedication to duty will clash with local big shots accustomed to having people like him in their pocket\u2014or chasing them out of town.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That tension worsens when a mentally challenged Romani girl (Eylul Ersoz) is assaulted, evidently not for the first time. Attempting to pursue justice, Emre finds himself implicated, blackmailed, threatened\u2014his only apparent allies being a pragmatic female judge (Selin Yeninci), and a local journalist (Ekin Koc) already ostracized as a political critic and apparent gay man.<\/p>\n

Is Emre gay as well? We\u2019re never sure. But as pervasive corruption curdles towards mob violence, his new enemies certainly won\u2019t refrain from deploying homophobia amongst their arsenal of weapons. A low-key thriller by western standards,\u00a0Burning Days\u00a0is engrossing and atmospheric, ending on an enigmatic note whose accusing tone the Turkish government took personally: It demanded reimbursement for the film\u2019s production funding, presumably because Alper\u2019s discretely-spelled-out gay theme was still too offending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s an inevitable fascination to hearing from artists what predecessors they were influenced by, or what contemporaries they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":388163,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-388162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/388163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}