There’s an inevitable fascination to hearing from artists what predecessors they were influenced by, or what contemporaries they find inspiring. It’s not unusual for a filmmaker to be given an opportunity to curate an evening or a series of films that influenced them. But it’s unusual for that kind of programming to happen between different media, which is one thing that makes the Fraenkel Film Festival so intriguing. Now in its third year, again at SF’s Roxie Theater, the annual event lets visual artists not normally associated with cinema—most of them tied to the Fraenkel Gallery, founded in 1979 with a then-primary emphasis on the art of photography—select a movie that particularly impacted them and their work.
The expanded 2026 edition opens this Wed/8 with Swiss-American multimedia veteran Christian Marclay’s choice: Brian De Palma’s Carrie, the first, and arguably still best, screen adaptation of a Stephen King novel, originally released in our nation’s Bicentennial year. (An occasion that didn’t 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’s Bergman’s 1966 psychological puzzle Persona (picked by Robert Adams), Hitchcock’s peak adventure thriller North by Northwest (Lee Friedlander), iconic anime Princess Mononoke (Martine Guttierez) and family favorite The Princess Bride (Elisheva Biernoff). Plus cult classics Grey Gardens (Sophie Calle), The Warriors (Wardell Milan) and Withnail & I (Richard Learoyd).
The selections reach as far back as Jean Renoir’s 1939 The Rules of the Game (Nicholas Nixon) and Samuel Fuller’s brassy 1953 noir Pickup on South Street (Nan Goldin); as recent as Spike Jonze’s 2013 sci-fi drama Her (Richard Misrach) and Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror hit Get Out (Carrie Mae Weems). Arthouse auteurs are represented in quantity, including Almodovar with Law of Desire (Liz Deschenes), Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (Kota Ezawa), Tarkovsky’s Solaris (Adam Fuss), Chabrol’s La Ceremonie (Katy Grannan), and Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (Alec Soth). The latter is among a handful of films shown in 35mm prints, alongside Alan Pakula’s 1971 Klute, 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.
A couple of the festival’s selections will likely be new to most viewers. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s choice The Face of Another, originally released in 1966, was one of four collaborations that decade between Japanese novelist Kobo Abe and director Hiroshi Teshigahara. 1962’s Woman in the Dunes was 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’s disfigured in an industrial accident, then exhibits increasingly disturbing behavior once a doctor outfits him with a remarkably convincing facial mask.
Richard T. Walker’s pick Happy as Lazzaro is from Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher, whose prior The Wonders and subsequent La Chimera were both more widely seen than this 2018 feature. But it’s 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’re so ignorant, they don’t realize their sharecropper-type servitude to an aristocratic padrona (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’s halfway point, however, both his and the community’s 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’s margins.
In addition to the 20 movies showing through Sat/18, the Frankel Film Festival will also host a panel entitled “Everything You Wanted to Know About the SF Art World” on Sat/11 at 3:45 pm, featuring reps from several local galleries concurrently showing in the Fraenkel’s collaborative exhibit “A Slice of the Pie” (more info on the show here). For a full schedule and other info on the Roxie series, go here.
The Roxie also has a couple unrelated revivals on tap starting this weekend. There’s a 40th anniversary re-release of Sherman’s March, which put documentarian Ross McElwee and a particular brand of humorously very personal nonfiction cinema on the map, three years before Roger & Me. Subtitled “A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation,” it’s an exercise in drawling absurdism—balancing awkward diaristic confession with a distinctively North Carolinan cultural snapshot. Its return (opening Fri/10) offers a prelude to the same director’s new Remake, a much more somber piece—generated by the death of McElwee’s troubled son—that arrives in local theaters later this month.
Infinitely sillier is a more obscure Eighties nugget, Icaro Martins and Jose Antonio Garcia’s Onda Nova aka New Wave. Comparable to such US drive-in softcore skinflicks around the same time as H.O.T.S., Spring Break, and Hardbodies, it’s superficially about a first women’s soccer team being formed in Sao Paolo after a long ban. But mostly it’s about the team members and their friends stripping down and making out at every opportunity, in every combination. (Though there’s no man-on-man action till near the end.)
High on bodily friction if short on narrative conflict, the film has much full-frontal nudity—yes, for both men and women—a 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’t have the rights to. Given the amount of lesbian frolicking on display, you’d expect homophobia to be a plot element. Oddly, it’s not—but off-screen, the military dictatorship compensated by promptly banning the movie for “amorality.” 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 chutzpah of its creation in 1983. The Roxie’s scheduled playdates are here.
Such (or any) movies don’t magically preserve themselves. You can get a peek at the process by which a lucky few are kept alive for new generations via BAMPFA’s “Film Preservationist Ross Lipman in Person” program this week. For three days, Thurs/9-Sat/11, the Los Angeles-based author, restorationist and filmmaker will present projects he’s overseen. All of them are treasures from the annals of American independent cinema: Barbara Loden’s sole directorial feature, the 1970 working-class character drama Wanda; Rob Epstein’s seminal chapter in LGBTQ history, 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk; and Kent Mackenzie’s 1961 fiction/nonfiction hybrid The Exiles, a remarkable memento of a subterranean Native American community living in L.A.’s now-erased Bunker Hill neighborhood.
Lipman will also deliver the multimedia lecture-presentation “Crossroads and the Exploding Digital Inevitable,” in which he provides artistic and historical context for Bruce Conner’s Crossroads. 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.
New movies of note:
Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World
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 used her medium to convey a “sense of rapture” whose lack of overt politics or personal disclosure wasn’t always in critical fashion. But for some time it made her the art form’s most popular practitioner in the US. Sasha Waters’ documentary finds the subject called “very famous yet completely elusive,” with many devoted readers long unaware she was a lesbian—let 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 “very close to a hermit’s life” for a much more public role, largely lured out by her journalist friend Maria Schriver.
For all her privacy, Oliver also moved in somewhat starry circles, from an early job with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 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 American Masters presentation does justice to a scribe whose poems “speak the language of the soul,” as no less a fan than Oprah claims. It opens Fri/10 at SF’s Opera Plaza Cinemas and Marin’s Smith Rafael Film Center, then Thurs/16 at the Roxie Theater.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
I’ve liked movies by director David Wain, though only two—teen sex comedy spoof Wet Hot American Summer and Paul Rudd-Seann William Scott vehicle Role Models—seem to have been liked by anybody else. Often writing in tandem with fellow alumni of sketch comedy group The State, his is an improv-derived humor that’s familiarly snarky but also a little anarchic, with surreal digressions that can be inspired…or fall flat. Most recent small-screen effort They 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 Wizard of Oz spin with a host of celebrity cameos. Still, I can’t say I disliked it. Their sensibility is at least kind-of-amusing even when it’s not actually funny, or the cheerfully unpredictable ideas don’t quite work.
Gail (Zoey Deutch) is an uber-perky, wholesome hairdresser in smalltown Kansas who’s about to marry high school sweetheart Tom (Michael Cassidy)—former head cheerleader weds former starting quarterback, natch. They jokingly ponder which famous person they’d each “do” if given a “free pass” 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).
Upon arrival, they’re 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 own celebrity 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’s erstwhile Mad Men costar John Slattery.
This is all extremely silly, a sustained goof that is never dull… yet never hilarious, either. It’s one of those films you guess was probably a joy for everyone involved to make, though somehow that delight doesn’t fully translate for the viewer. Why? Who knows. Comedy is hard, its workings mysterious. Nonetheless, Gail Daughtry is diverting—and it will probably play better with an audience than it did being solo-watched by me. It opens in theaters nationwide Fri/10.
Travel Is Broadening: Spanish ‘Romeria,’ Turkish ‘Burning Days’
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—sometimes emotionally, sometimes physically. Carla Simon’s Romeria (which opens Fri/10 at the Roxie) is, like her prior Summer 1993 and Alcarras, a family story. But for orphaned Marina (Llucia Garcia Mitch), who was raised by relatives on her mother’s side, meeting her father’s relations is an entirely new experience. As she’s 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’s 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’s always been told about her long-dead parents.
In the film’s 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.
Veteran Turkish writer-director Emin Alper’s Burning Days is a co-production with France that is actually from 2022 (he’s made another acclaimed film since, this year’s Salvation), but is getting its first real U.S. release now on streaming platform Metrograph at Home. Emre (Selahattin Pasali) is a boyish young lawyer newly appointed to a rural area as state prosecutor. He’s 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—or chasing them out of town.
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—his 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.
Is Emre gay as well? We’re never sure. But as pervasive corruption curdles towards mob violence, his new enemies certainly won’t refrain from deploying homophobia amongst their arsenal of weapons. A low-key thriller by western standards, Burning Days is engrossing and atmospheric, ending on an enigmatic note whose accusing tone the Turkish government took personally: It demanded reimbursement for the film’s production funding, presumably because Alper’s discretely-spelled-out gay theme was still too offending.
