The bigger 2026 annual local film festivals are still a few weeks or months off, but this weekend brings a couple appetizer-like events preceding those full courses. Actually, there’s a pretty substantial cinematic menu on tap at the Jewish Film Institute’s Winterfest, a two-day residency at SF’s Vogue Theater whose eight programs (including two all-shorts ones) on Sat/28-Sun/1 encompass a wide gamut of movies from around the world.
There are feature-length documentaries about late filmmakers, with Guillaume Ribot’s All I Had Was Nothingness examining the creation of Claude Lanzmann’s landmark Shoah, while Alan Berliner’s Benita memorializes experimentalist B. Raphan. Narratives traverse a lot of time and space: Ken Scott’s French Once Upon My Mother is a seriocomic family tale set in 1960s Paris; Shai Carmeli-Pollack’s award-winning Israeli The Sea dramatizes a curious West Bank child’s refusal to play by the rules levied upon Palestinians; Son of Saul director Laszlo Nemes’ new Orphan focuses on another rebellious boy, a Jewish kid growing up in Soviet-controlled 1950s Budapest. Winterfest ends Sunday night with Yes, the latest missive from Israeli provocateur Nadav Lapid (Ahed’s Knee, Synonyms). This one is a reportedly savage 150-minute social satire whose left-leaning Tel Aviv jazz musician antihero perversely accepts a commission to compose a new, implicitly right-wing patriotic anthem.
This June will see Frameline return at last to the Castro. But if you can’t wait that long for a big dose of gay images onscreen—albeit in smaller bites—this Sat/28 brings the day-long Emeryville International LGBTQ+ Film Festival. Formerly known as Drag Me to the Cinema, it’s got four two-hour blocks of thematically tied shorts, from places like Australia and Luxembourg as well as the U.S. A first show at noon, “Pure.Queer.Joy,” is “family-friendly-ish.” The remaining three at 2, 4, and 6pm are recommended for viewers age 18 and over. There’s also a lone feature film slot at 8pm, but it’s already sold out, and we could not discern from the festival’s website what that title is, anyway.
With the current federal administration’s tastes in chemical escape apparently running more towards Adderall, alcohol, ketamine, and cocaine sniffed off toilet seats, it may seem an odd cultural moment to focus on psychedelics. But out of the blue, that has surfaced in quite a number of screen selections this week. Foremost is the start of BAMPFA’s six-week “Psychedelia & Cinema” series (Sun/1-May 10), organized in conjunction with the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics—whose very existence offers heartening evidence that the “spirit of the Sixties” endures, at least a bit.
It begins Sunday afternoon with a showing (already sold out) of Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens’ recent John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, chronicling the often controversial career of the scientist whose explorations of consciousness encompassed inventing the isolation tank, taking LSD, studying dolphin brains, teaching at Esalen, friendships with Ginsberg & Leary, et al. He provided a model for the “psychonaut” explorer played by William Hurt in that evening’s fictive selection Altered States—a hit 1980 thriller directed by the ever-baroque Ken Russell. Though disowned by its screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky, it became an instant, enduring cult classic.
Elsewhere in the series, there are other mainstream Hollywood stabs at depicting hallucinatory insight (Roger Corman’s 1967 The Trip, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey), and esoteric visions of the same from farther afield (Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s 2015 Embrace of the Serpent, Jodorowsky’s 1973 The Holy Mountain, Richard Linklater’s 2006 Philip K. Dick-derived A Scanner Darkly, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2021 Memoria, Jessica Beshir’s Ethiopia-set Faya Dayi). Plus two movies dedicated to the cosmic consciousness of late jazz adventurer Sun Ra: His 1974 sci-fi feature vehicle Space Is the Place, a seminal text for Afrofuturism, and Christine Turner’s Sun Ra: Do the Impossible, a recent documentary biopic. There are also more experimental works of various length, including contributions from Kenneth Anger, Steven Arnold, Jordan Belson, Nathaniel Dorsky, Lillian Schwartz, Annie MacDonell, Guvnor Nelson and Bruce Conner.
Two of the trippier big-budget movies ever produced by the entertainment industry happen to be getting a limited re-release in newly restored prints this week. Though neither are about drugs, exactly, both portray epic physical adventures in terms that seem greatly influenced by notions of internal spiritual journey. Alejandro Gonzalez’s Oscar-winning 2015 The Revenant is an unusually lyrical (if also violent) period western, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy as deadly adversaries in the Dakotas 200 years ago. It plays IMAX screens (including SF’s AMC Metreon) nationwide, Thu/26 and Sun/1.
Another hugely challenging production, the 1977 Sorcerer, was William Friedkin’s first after the enormous successes of The French Connection and The Exorcist. This often awesomely visceral remake of The Wages of Fear, with four fugitive men transporting nitro glycerin 200 miles over treacherous South American rural roads, was an expensive flop—apparently too grim and hostile in tone for wide audiences. But it’s a remarkable film the director considered his best. It plays SF’s Roxie Theater starting Thu/5.
Filmmakers are still voyaging into psychotropic storytelling, though maybe not as often as they once did. Playing Mon/2 only at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission is “psychedelic jungle thriller” Wetiko, in which a young Mayan man (Juan Daniel Garcia Trevino) delivers bufo toads with hallucinogenic properties to a strange, remote enclave of western “spiritual tourists.” Interesting if incompletely realized, with the hot colors of a black light poster, this sophomore feature from Kerry Mondragon (who’ll be present at the screening) is a big leap forward from her messy first, 2019’s Tyger Tyger.
A veteran in the realm of agitatedly altered cinema is Jon Moritsugu, the onetime San Francisco resident whose prior underground features include Hippy Porn, Terminal USA, and Mod Fuck Explosion. His first in some years, Numbskull Revolution, is a long-aborning project in a typically antic, colorful and snarkily satirical mode. Cowriter/spouse Amy Davis and former Gregg Araki regular James Duval play conceptual artists drugging their way through epic career rivalry in a dystopian near-future “punk rock Blade Runner.” Moritsugu will attend Movies for Maniacs’ local premiere, Fri/27 at SF’s 4-Star.
Finally, that most reliably mind-expanding of documentary and dramatic filmmakers, Werner Herzog, is back with Ghost Elephants, which opens Fri/27 at the Kabuki 8 in SF and Santa Clara’s Mercado 20. Despite that title, it is a fairly straightforward, National Geographic-produced nature doc, chronicling the search for a particular African species that could be descended from the prehistoric largest-land-mammal ever—or could simply be a tribal myth. Even in his 80s, Herzog still loves a trek…the more grueling and dangerous, the better. (“Steve has been assured crocodiles will only come after nightfall,” we’re told at one point.) This Wild Kingdom-like adventure may lack the immersive, transcendent qualities of his best work, but it has its surreal, scenic, and sly aspects.
Also opening this weekend:
Carmen Maura-palooza: ‘Calle Malaga,’ ‘Crazy Old Lady’
Also in her early 80s is Spanish actress Maura, who rose to fame in the earlier films of Pedro Almodovar, particularly Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Then they had a falling out (purportedly over her having another commitment that precluded starring in his next movie), their paths not converging onscreen again until Volver 18 years later, in 2006. But she’s remained a busy, much-awarded and popular figure in (mostly) Spanish-language cinema, even if her visibility in the United States has dimmed.
It happens that her two latest vehicles, however, arrive here simultaneously on Fri/27. Calle Malaga from Maryam Touzani of The Blue Caftan has her as a widow who was born in Tangiers, and intends to die there. But she’s shocked when a grown daughter (Marta Etura), facing financial difficulties in Madrid, decides to sell the flat she lives in—which is legally in that offspring’s name.
Maria Angeles grimly moves out, into an elder-care residence… but that doesn’t suit her one whit. Constructing an elaborate fabrication, she sneaks back to her old (and not yet sold) flat, plotting to stay there as long as she can. Her resourcefulness eventually extends to starting a business, and acquiring her first lover in decades. A low-key crowdpleaser, Calle Malaga manages to wring something upbeat from the nightmare scenario of a senior being forced out of their home, into the company of complete strangers.
A very different approach to a similar premise—the senior parent still living alone—is taken by Crazy Old Lady aka Vieja loca, which is going straight to genre streaming platform Shudder in the United States. Alicia (Maura) is being visited shortly by her daughter and granddaughter, but their arrival is delayed by a major storm. The daughter grows concerned over Alicia’s evident senile disorientation over the phone, so she asks ex-husband Pedro (Daniel Hendler) to go over and basically do a wellness check.
Unfortunately for him, the octogenarian is far, far worse off than anyone guessed—and her mistaking him for an abusive former lover has immediate, brutal consequences. Writer-director Martin Maurengui’s horror thriller soon reduces him to a bound captive at major risk of grievous bodily harm. The leads are fine—Maura all more frightening for refusing to chew scenery in her character’s malevolent craziness. But skillfully handled as it is, there’s also a certain claustrophobic theatricality to this single-setting, one-note exercise in mingled black comedy and sadism. Throwing themselves into strenuous roles, these performers nonetheless deserve better material.
Dreams
Meanwhile in the realm of the (comparatively) young and very horny, there is this latest from Michel Franco, whose variable but always intriguing prior features included After Lucia, Chronic, Sundown, and the alarming New Order. As ever, his screenplay here grapples with some compelling moral quandaries. Isaac Fernandez plays Fernando, a professional dancer from a prosperous Mexico City family who nonetheless takes the perilous border-crossing course of illegal human trafficking to be reunited with his older lover in San Francisco.
She (Jessica Chastain, who also starred in Franco’s Memory last year) is a single socialite who lives in Pacific Heights and runs her wealthy father’s charity foundation with her conservative brother (Rupert Friend). Jennifer’s life is mostly contained within a long-running version of San Francisco you might barely be aware of if you’re not part of it: One that’s very white and all about money, no matter what liberal attitudes get hat-tipped to.
She may be having a passionate affair with a young Mexican, but she’s not about to let anyone know about that—at least no one who “counts,” like family members she knows will disapprove. Fernando, meanwhile, is increasingly exasperated at being treated like a secret boy-toy. At one point he makes a break from her, promptly getting hired as a principal performer by SF Ballet. (Hernandez actually has been a company member there, and is magnetically impressive in his dance sequences here.) But the two can’t stay away from each other, to catastrophic final results.
Franco’s cool, borderline clinical take on hot-button issues can put them in sharp relief. But it fails in Dreams, which from a distance looks like a conventional star-crossed-lovers thing between movie-star-gorgeous figures. But it doesn’t convince us there’s anything real between them, beyond apparent sexual chemistry. (And those “daring” sex scenes, alas, also feel a bit clinical.) Why are these two together at all? Can’t he find someone who’ll acknowledge him publicly, and not bridle with stereotypical Ugly American impatience if he speaks a word of Spanish? (And why would the presumably well-educated Jennifer, who has ongoing work connections in Mexico, not know at least a bit of that language by now?) Chastain is at her most glamorous, but her character is ultimately a stock caricature of privilege.
While Franco eventually rachets things up to a level of violent conflict, the stinging payoff we expect from him doesn’t deliver, because these people never become fully credible or sympathetic. Dreams isn’t some cheesy erotic thriller. But it might have been better as one—in the end, it isn’t good enough to take itself so seriously. Sorry, but frustrated desire between a hot aging debutante and hotter ballet soloist is the stuff of pulp fiction… not an apt metaphor for the fraught political reality of U.S.-Mexico relations at present.
