Two of the greatest, most distinctive American directors of the last few decades are getting local retrospectives starting this week—one posthumously, another in-person. The dearly departed personage is the subject of “In Dreams: A Tribute to David Lynch.” The Roxie Theater showcase opening Thurs/6 features plenty of movies one suspects have played that venue many times since their original release: Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire. But there’s also (on Sunday) his divisive version of Dune, an expensive commercial failure, and the series begins with 2016 documentary portrait David Lynch: The Art Life, which also plays Wed/12.
Still very much among the living is Todd Haynes, who first came to the fore in the New Queer Cinema wave with 1991’s arresting omnibus feature Poison. He’s since well established himself as an unpredictable, refined, original voice straddling the indie and mainstream worlds with such singular features as the ambiguous illness-as-metaphor drama Safe, glam rock fiction Velvet Goldmine, Bob Dylan phantasmagoria I’m Not There, and 1950s Hollywood melodrama homage Far From Heaven.
Those four last-named films kick off BAMPFA’s “Todd Haynes: Far From Safe” series this weekend, Sat/8 and Sun/9—with the director present for a live conversation at each screening. You can try your luck at the door in downtown Berkeley, but all those shows are already sold out.
The subsequent weeks of the program, however, should be more easily accessed. Running through April 12, they’ll encompass his more recent features Dark Waters (a fact-based docudrama starring Mark Ruffalo), celebrated period lesbian romance Carol (with Cate Blanchett in the title role), children’s fantasy Wonderstruck, and the juicily soap-operatic May December. Plus his fantastic 2021 documentary about The Velvet Underground, the aforementioned Poison, and a March 20 bill of short “early works” that include his little-seen 1985 debut work Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud and the grotesque, quasi-sitcomish dysfunctional family opus Dottie Gets Spanked.
It’s doubtful most Americans—even dedicated cineastes—could name a single African director, and in some ways you can’t blame them. Many of that continent’s nations have seen their film industries grow very slowly, or stunted from growth at all, for the various economic and political reasons you might expect. Still, it’s lamentable that the amount of activity there is generally gets so little attention abroad, with rare exceptions.
Providing an annual corrective to that lack is the African Film Festival, an NYC-based entity whose touring edition has likewise stopped at BAMPFA for many years now. The 2025 program begins this Thurs/6 with Ottis Ba’s A Tooth For a Tooth, in which a civil servant downsized out of his longtime Dakar job by IMF “austerity measures” has great difficulty adjusting his ego and habits to a reduced societal stature. This tart tale offers a timely illustration of the kind of instability fostered when First World nations reduce or cut off the funds that help Third World ones develop.
Later titles include another from Senegal Moussa Sene Absa’s saga of misogynist abuse, Xale; from Zambia, I Am Not a Witch creator Rungano Nyoni’s new On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, which won a prize at Cannes and will soon open in U.S. theaters; Jose Miguel Ribeiro’s Nayola, a sumptuously colored animation depicting three generations of women enduring Angola’s civil war; and Osvalde Lewat’s MK: Mandela’s Secret Army, a documentary about the South African freedom fighter’s less-heralded involvement with armed resistance against Apartheid.
An archival feature offered in newly restored form March 16 is Ousmane Sembene and Thierno Faty Sow’s 1988 epic Camp de Thiaroye, a nearly three-hour dramatization of a notorious incident. When soldiers from throughout Africa returned from long military combat service on behalf of the Allies in 1944, some were held in a Dakar “transit camp” where their treatment was very much like that accorded POWs. Lied to, poorly fed, cheated of back pay, they rebelled—and were slaughtered by the French troops they’d fought beside. Almost half a century later, this fierce indictment proved so discomfiting to erstwhile colonialists, it was banned from exhibition in France for a decade. Info on the entire African Film Festival 2025 program (which runs through April 6) in Berkeley can be found here.
Other new arrivals this week:
There’s Still Tomorrow
Actress Paola Cortellesi’s debut feature as writer-director was a big winner at last year’s Donatello Awards—Italy’s Oscars—even if it lost Best Film to Matteo Garrone’s African-emigre drama Il capitano. If that feature portrayed a present-and-future reality of Europe inundated by refugees, this B&W throwback is very much about an insulated past.
It’s mid-1946, with Allied troops still patrolling Rome’s streets after the end of WW2. But global events have done very little to change the circumstances of women like Delia (Cortellesi), who toils endlessly without complaint or thanks, yet is battered by a husband (Valerio Mastandrea as Ivano) who’s forever calling her “useless.” Taking after “papa,” their two young sons are little hellions; the invalid father-in-law she’s stuck caring for is an obnoxious manchild. But Delia has hopes of a better life for her teenage daughter Marcella (Romana Maggiora Vergano), though the latter’s engagement to a boy from a “better” family might not be the boon it appears.
In addition to its messaging in favor of incipient feminism and against brute patriarchy, this artfully crafted tale is a salute to Italian cinema’s postwar neorealism vogue. But it also offers the boisterous domestic dynamics of later homegrown comedies, some melodramatic hyperrealism a la A Streetcar Named Desire, and flights of fantasy that take the form of quasi-dance numbers. I wasn’t crazy about the latter, or Cortellesi’s decision to include numerous anachronistic musical choices. You can also quibble with her ending, which hinges on an important historic development (Italy’s first national election open to women voters) that the script should have enhanced by laying some preparatory ground for. Still, Tomorrow—which was a huge hit on home turf—is engaging, suspenseful, and executed with considerable panache. It opens at the Smith Rafael Film Center in Marin on Fri/7.
Seven Veils
By contrast, the protagonist played by Amanda Seyfried in Atom Egoyan’s latest film lives a very liberated existence—she’s a theater director hired to oversee the revival of a celebrated late mentor’s staging of Richard Strauss’ opera Salome, meanwhile leaving her husband in temporary sole care of their child. But of course Jeanine’s apparent success isn’t all it seems. Her marriage may be on the rocks; her creative ideas are resisted by current collaborators, from opera-house management to the boorosh male singing lead (Michael Kupfer-Radecky). There’s all sorts of backstage intrigue, plus tangled backstories of prior line-crossing romances and abusive behaviors, both in the professional and family spheres. Inevitably, Jeanine begins going down a path familiar from Black Swan and myriad other psychodramas, as she grows unstable projecting her own repressed issues onto the art-work she’s simultaneously losing control of.
Once Canada’s most promising director, Egoyan has largely disappointed those expectations over the last quarter-century, delivering one film after another that’s been some combination of lurid, pretentious, silly, and frustrating. Seven Veils is probably his best in some time, even though it still shares many of those faults. Shot while he was directing an actual production of Salome (which looks quite striking here), it is heavy with #MeToo-related issues shoehorned into an already contrived, cluttered narrative. Jeanine isn’t all that sympathetic a heroine, in part because we don’t much root for her as an artist—her ideas often seem terrible, though I’m not sure if that’s deliberate. Nonetheless, Egoyan remains an elegant craftsman even when his script lets him down, and this very mixed bag does somewhat pull itself together by the end. It’s opening Fri/7 at theaters including SF’s Opera Plaza Cinemas and various AMC multiplexes.
The Rule of Jenny Pen
Salome, John the Baptist, et al. have nothing on the cruel theatrics taking place in a Wellington rest home in New Zealand director James Ashcroft’s second feature. Geoffrey Rush plays Stefan, a veteran judge whose career behind the gavel stops short when he suffers a stroke in the courtroom. To recoup—if, indeed, he can—he’s placed in Royal Pine Mews, an elder-care facility where his condescending and irascible demeanor quickly alienates the staff.
That proves unfortunate, as he soon needs their help: Semi-helpless in his wheelchair, Stefan becomes one more available victim for a sadistic fellow resident. Able-bodied apart from the occasional asthma attack, Dave (John Lithgow) is an outwardly doddering oldster who under the cover of night proves insidiously resourceful. He terrorizes Stefan’s roommate Tony (George Henare), too, but even that ex-rugby player is too intimidated to fight back. As the battle between the two central men escalates, it’s clear this place isn’t big enough for them both to survive in.
In a sense an updated male version of the 1960s “psycho-biddy” thriller genre commenced by Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Jenny Pen (named after a creepy baby-doll puppet Dave uses as a goading ventriloquist’s dummy) is less camp and more sheerly unpleasant than those movies were. It’s effective, but somewhat mean-spirited, with Lithgow once again a little too vividly awful in another of his many villainous roles. There are some basic credibility issues to grapple with: Doesn’t this institution have security cameras? Doesn’t the protagonist have a phone, or online access? If you’ve visited such places, you know staff are omnipresent…yet here they never, ever seem to be anywhere nearby when Dave is committing his mayhem. That said, this horror-adjacent tale is skillfully acted and staged, to suitably nerve-jangling effect. It opens Fri/7 at SF’s Alamo Drafthouse.
Choice Excavations: 1960s Finnish Sci-Fi, Surreal 1970s Gay Porn
Two highly idiosyncratic relics from the more esoteric corners of cinema over half a century ago become available this weekend—one via streaming, another in rare local screening. Those who prefer their entertainment to fall in the realm of “cult” should pay heed. I’d before never heard of shortlived (he died in a 1977 car crash) Finnish filmmaker-academic Risto Jarva or his 1969 sci-fi epic Time of Roses, but am glad to have corrected that gap.
This B&W feature takes place in a slightly dystopian future where everyone seems to be on the young side, a la Logan’s Run. A documentarian (Arto Tuominen) whose projects amplify government propaganda researches what is meant to be a cautionary film about a model-actress (Ritva Vepsa) who died decades earlier. But of course the further he gets into it, the more disturbing his findings are—including insights about his own supposedly privileged existence. With its semi-satirical sexploitation elements and very op-art trappings (lots of inflatable furniture), the movie uses modest means to cleverly evoke a skin-deep society whose slick surface conceals a void. The storytelling is digressive to an almost aimless extent, yet Time is always diverting to watch. It’s accessible on arthouse streaming platform OVID as of Fri/7.
The next night, Frameline under the auspices of the Superfine Art Fair (ensconced this week at Fort Mason) will show Wakefield Poole’s 1972 “all-male” adult feature Bijou. Likewise resourcefully sketching a dreamlike alternative universe on slim means, it’s a wordless fantasy in which an ostensibly straight construction worker (Bill Harrison, a man with a very long natural talent ifyouknowwhatImean) is given an admission ticket to a mysterious private club. In its labyrinthine interiors, his sexual horizons become greatly expanded. While it may not be the most intense or graphic in purely erotic terms, Bijou may well remain the best gay “porno” ever made, artistically—it’s funny, imaginative, aesthetically striking and enigmatic. Admission includes a pre-screening mixer plus entree to the Art Fair all day. For more info, go here.
