Here are my top picks at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF36), underway right now throughout the Bay Area. The romance Fever at Dawn plays in Palo Alto tonight. This weekend, the festival hosts the West Coast premiere of the documentary The Last Laugh, which explores (gasp) humor and the Holocaust.
In theaters right now:
- The Japanese domestic drama Our Little Sister is remarkably uplifting. I would seek it out because it’s unlikely to remain in theaters for more than two or three weeks.
- Zero Days is a documentary on a jaw-dropping hacker mystery – who and how was able to get Iranian military computers to destroy the hardware for their own nuclear weapons program.
- Opening today in San Francisco, the subversive documentary Under the Sun is a searing insight into totalitarian North Korean society, all from government-approved filming that tells a different story than the wackadoodle dictatorship intended.
- Finding Dory doesn’t have the breakthrough animation or the depth of story that we expect from Pixar, but it won’t be painful to watch a zillion times with your kids.
- I’m not writing about Ghostbusters, but I’ve seen it, and it’s not terrible. Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy are brilliant talents, and they produce some laughs in Ghostbusters.
My DVD/Stream of the week is the harrowing thriller ’71, about a nail-biting 24 hours in Northern Ireland’s Troubles. ’71 is now available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
Tomorrow night, Turner Classic Movies presents one of my favorite film noirs, The Lineup (1958), with its dazzling San Francisco locations.
