Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival, is underway; scroll down to see what I’ve written about several Frameline films.
OUT NOW
- The Last Black Man in San Francisco is an absorbing exploration of inner lives reacting to a changing city – and it’s one of the best films of the year. The link will go live this weekend after I finish my review.
- The wildly successful comedy Booksmart is an entirely fresh take on the coming of age film, and a high school graduation party romp like you’ve never seen. Directed and written by women, BTW.
- The Fall of the American Empire is a pointed satire cleverly embedded in the form of a heist film.
- Rocketman is more of a jukebox musical than a film biography, but it’s wonderfully entertaining.
- So you think you know what you’re going to get from a movie titled Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. It is indeed a documentary of a concert tour, but Scorsese adds some fictional flourish, as befits Dylan’s longtime trickster persona.
- Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen are pleasantly entertaining in the improbable Beauty-and-the-Beast romantic comedy Long Shot.
- The documentary Framing John DeLorean is an incomplete retelling of this modern Icarus fable. If you already know the basics of the DeLorean story, I’d recommend this Car and Driver article instead. Framing John DeLorean is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
ON VIDEO
I have the perfect film to kick off the summer – the marvelously entertaining dark comic thriller Headhunters. You can stream Headhunters on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube or Google Play It’s such a great choice, I’ll reprise it next week, too.
ON TV
Wow, on June 24, Turner Classic Movies will present two classics from the 1970s. The first is one of the all-time greats of cinema – Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. It’s a masterpiece exploration of alienation through its searing portrait of loner Travis Bickle, played by an explosive Robert De Niro. Also the first glimpse of Jodi Foster’s genius.
Then there’s the original Shaft – a low-budget and simplistic film not anywhere in the class of Taxi Driver. But it is the icon of the Blaxploitation genre and a snapshot of an important moment in our culture. And – it has one of the best movie theme songs EVER. I can’t hear it without thinking of songwriter Isaac Hayes accepting his Best Song Oscar in his shirt-of-chains.
