Festival season is upon us, if last week didn't tip you off. This week, we've got two to highlight. First up is the 49th Mill Valley Film Festival.

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 […]

What was happening in The Waiting Room (1973), for those of us watching in a Los Angeles microcinema last Tuesday, was that every time a “good feeling,” a sense of awe or a snare of comfort that a plo...

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...

Before the regular round up, it's an exciting weekend of niche festivals in the Bay: Georgian Cinema Now: Part 1 takes over BAMPFA with a nearly a dozen Georgian films from the last decade and a sympo...

Get Screen Slate delivered to your inbox Our NYC daily newsletter dispatches listings and critical essays 365 days a year. The SF Bay weekly newsletter contains essays and a rundown of current series ...

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...

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

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

Queens-based filmmaker, musician, animator, and doting father Cory McAbee has been a cross-country fixture of DIY screening spaces and rock venues for going on three decades. Before relocating to our ...

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...

Monday, Clarence Brown's Joan Crawford-starring Letty Lytton (repeats Thursday), nearly unseen for 90 years, is newly restored in Wild, Weird, Wicked: Films from Before the Code at the Roxie, who also...

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 ...

After the United States took the Philippines from Spain in 1898, the American occupying forces initiated nothing less than a race war. The conflict, according to the historian Ken De Bevoise, “contrib...

Although the exuberant amazement of Saint Omer’s (2022) reception has at times suggested otherwise, Alice Diop is hardly an emerging filmmaker. The sensitive and political eye behind her latest and mo...

Monday, The Time Masters is at the Roxie, Downtown 81 is at the Balboa, RRR is at the New Parkway, Free Willy and Days of

This year’s edition of the Crossroads Film Festival opens with a shorts program that includes the filmmaker Amy Reid’s sensitively textured Bay Area Sampler Quilt (2026), a small-gauge paean to the ar...

Monday, Satyajit Ray's The Big City is at the New Parkway, the new Butthole Surfers doc is at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission (NM) with a live-streamed Q&A (before a sold-out in-person appearance on ...

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!

Movies and TV shows often struggle to depict digital communication in a cinematic way, which has generated no end of discourse over the past 20 or so years—particularly around how much this is to blam...

The French theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord’s In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire, 1979) presents a montage of archival photographs and...

Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler first laid eyes on each other at the premiere of Ingreen, Dorsky’s first film, at the Washington Square Gallery in August of 1964, though whether they actually met th...

Monday, Mikey and Nicky is at the Alamo Drafthouses New Mission (NM) and Mountain View (MV), Raising Cain is at the Alamo Drafthouse Valley Fair (VF) (also at NM and MV on Wed.), Drunken Noodles and A...

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 ...

Monday, the Balboa screens a new restoration of Guy Maddin's Careful, the classic 1933 throuple comedy Design for Living continues the Roxie's Wild, Weird, Wicked: Films From Before the Code, Jane Sch...

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...

Few directors have navigated both knee-jerk revulsion and repentant revaluation so deftly as Mary Harron. Though now considered staples of American independent cinema, the writer-director’s films have...

For over two decades, the Texas-born filmmaker Patrick Wang has created deeply human works anchored by empathy. This thread of sensitivity runs through the sprawling, three-hour custody saga of In The...

Monday, Pedro Almodovar's Law of Desire (on 35mm) returns once more to the Roxie alongside a free with RSVP screening of Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, Shunji Iwai's Love Letter (repeats Sunday), and the ...

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...

Monday, the SF Jewish Film Festival continues all week, Time Masters is at the Balboa, Flow is at the Alamo Drafthouses New Mission (NM), Valley Fair (VF), and Mountain View (MV), Orlando at the Draft...

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...