The Argentine director Milagros Mumenthaler believes in ghosts but not villains. The Currents (2025), her third feature, presents a woman named Catalina who is haunted, completely and in the most mund...

September 24 – 27 · The Roxie Theater Re:Vision—Festival of Restoration and Rediscovery is SFFP’s inaugural film festival, celebrating the work of archives and archivists. Over four days at the […]

The heavens and sea mirror one another as they enclose a land further defined by its colonial past in the opening shots of Margot Benacerraf’s Araya (1959). These material realities in Venezuela’s Ara...

In the 1930s, at the same time Walt Disney was fine-tuning the spotless craftsmanship of film animation that still dominates the market nearly a century later, Len Lye unveiled his first revolutionary...

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The second installment of Louise Weard’s Castration Movie Anthology is subtitled The Best of Both Worlds. In the 5-hour handicam epic, this fairly pedestrian phrase takes on a greater meaning and, by ...

In the spring of 2017, after the first wet winter in many dry years, Nathaniel Dorsky walked with his Bolex through Golden Gate Park’s arboretum and noticed the blooming plants. Dorsky’s way of notici...

At one unfortunate, or perhaps fortunate, film festival screening of his child-centered drama Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987), Abbas Kiarostami informed the audience that the friend’s house and ma...

We're just a few months away from opening a new movie theater on Mission at 29th and we need your help!

Watching Wet Hot American Summer (2001) as it returns to theaters could be a "What the hell is water?” experience for newcomers. When it first came out, this was a film with a cast and crew of nearly ...

Robert Townsend says his “mind works differently.” Talking to him, it’s hard to disagree. The kineticism of his screen persona is hardly diminished in person, quoting his own movies verbatim, flying i...

It should come as no surprise that Ayn Rand's 1943 bestselling paean to unbridled individualism came to Hollywood through the advocacy of an actor. Without a hint of irony, Rand's novel portrays one m...

Talking about painting can bring to mind Bob Ross memes or John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. But talking about painting using the language of artists’ moving images is a different conversation altogether,...

Drawing from more than 400 hours of archival material, director Brydie O’Connor wove films, outtakes, and audio diaries that the avant-garde lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer created throughout her lif...

Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time (1979) would have us believe H.G. Wells’s second wife wasn’t in fact the London student and writer with whom he’d had a home-wrecking affair, but instead a hapless San...

There’s something all too alluring in the idea of being an inanimate object, beloved by those who use and abuse those often fragile beauties. Amanda Kramer’s By Design (2025) literalizes that concept ...

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s German Trilogy is about men who put on a show for the nation as it slowly descends into a self-made hell. The first two entries are about relatively sympathetic figures: Ludwig...

I take for granted that readers of Screen Slate need little encouragement when it comes to the marquee titles in this year’s edition of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. A screening of F.W. Murn...

Newsreel was effectively the agitprop documentary wing of the late-1960s U.S. New Left and its films were never meant to be viewed alone at home on a laptop. Mostly bypassing commercial distribution, ...

Hong Kong New Wave before Hong Kong New Wave, The Arch (1970) by Cecile Tang Shu Shuen was one of the first Chinese-language films to receive international critical acclaim and ranks among Hong Kong’s...

A retrospective series

Art history is easier to learn when artists and artworks are siloed into genres and movements: the chance happenings of Fluxus, the cultural appropriation of Pop Art, the postwar middle finger to trad...

Much like Saad Khan’s archival project “Khajistan,” Showgirls of Pakistan (2020) is adorned by a maximalistic, kitschy, almost otherworldly aesthetic. The documentary follows the lives of three Mujra ...

Recent years have seen fresh, imaginative depictions of the leader of the Catholic Church. Paolo Sorrentino’s HBO series gave us a Young Pope, while Edward Berger’s Conclave teased a Vaping Pope and u...

Long before the contemporary use of the trendy adjective “immersive” appeared in all sorts of descriptions that try to convince us to buy an experience, let’s say, spend a ridiculous amount of money p...

A Joe Dante film reliably delivers plots involving a particular brand of American normalcy upended in chaotic fashion, dazzling practical effects, cinephilic easter eggs, and, of course, guest spots f...

Brian De Palma’s Redacted (2007) is a hideous little movie about a hideous, gargantuan war that sidesteps most of the trapdoors that collapse even ostensibly peace-mongering war films into propaganda.

Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) is a spell preserved in cinema that lavishly presents the occult currents that fascinated the filmmaker throughout his life. A devotee of Thele...

All around us we are witnessing the collapse of the San Franc… Shapeshifters Cinema, Brewery and Café needs your support for Support Shapeshifters Cinema, Brewery & Café

The United States reached its peak beef consumption in 1976, reaching just shy of 95 lbs per capita. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1976 was also the bicentennial, a nationwide birthday party that permea...

The animated feature When the Wind Blows began as Raymond Briggs’s 1982 graphic novel about Jim and Hilda Bloggs, pensioners in the quiet, leafy Sussex countryside, preparing for the bomb—and for what...

Regular attendees of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will likely have noticed their recent focus on Swedish cinema, from retrospectives of Mai Zetterling, Roy Andersson, and Gunvor Ne...

presented in ballot order, from the link below, to allow for easy following along with those who made the selections first (each film can only be listed once) www.screenslate.com/articles/best-movies-...

After only two features, Bi Gan had already developed a fervent following from viewers who left the theater walking on air from the unfastened-camera showmanship of Kaili Blues (2015) and Long Day’s J...