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East Bay Express

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
The Secret Agent (2025) Jeffrey Edalatpour In the world Filho constructs, moral ambiguity doesn’t exist. Everyone is complicit.
Posted Dec 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Nuremberg (2025) Kelly Vance A grand, complex, thought-provoking, intelligent piece of work, a combination war movie/courtroom drama/political beacon, on a subject that most of its audience might think is over and done with.
Posted Nov 20, 2025  Edit critic review
Nouvelle Vague (2025) Kelly Vance Adventurous film nerds surrendering to Linklater’s vision of le beau monde are in for a treat.
Posted Nov 05, 2025  Edit critic review
Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 (2025) Kelly Vance In its particulars, Peck’s tribute to Orwell is a celebration of one of history’s most vigorous skeptics, a champion of humanism, who once declared: “All that matters has already been written.”
Posted Oct 14, 2025  Edit critic review
Truth & Treason (2025) Kelly Vance As a cautionary tale for our time, Truth & Treason succeeds on its realistic performances and its urgent energy. Whether it turns out to be a dire forecast of the future remains to be seen.
Posted Oct 14, 2025  Edit critic review
Riefenstahl (2024) Jeffrey Edalatpour With vast archival resources at his disposal, Veiel has constructed an eviscerating cinematic response to Leni Riefenstahl’s life and career as well as Ray Müller’s 1993 documentary, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.
Posted Sep 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Eden (2024) Kelly Vance Eden makes a strong argument for the female determinant in such rousing accounts of nonconformity. Hooray for blood and guts Darwinism!
Posted Aug 28, 2025  Edit critic review
Kerouac's Road: The Beat of a Nation (2025) Kelly Vance Director Ebs Burnough and writer Eliza Hindmarch take a different tack from most of the numerous treatments of the late author’s story. After a dazzling opening credits montage, the talking heads make their cases with appropriately surprising candor.
Posted Aug 14, 2025  Edit critic review
Oh, Hi! (2025) Kelly Vance Noah Baumbach would probably fall asleep in the first 30 minutes. Quentin Tarantino wouldn’t leave a single character standing. Greta Gerwig would tear up the scenario -- no use sending it back for a rewrite.
Posted Jul 29, 2025  Edit critic review
The Old Woman with the Knife (2025) Kelly Vance Filmmaker Min Kyu-dong, whose previous features have veered unsteadily from marital dramas to horror shockeroos, must have been out of his mind to put a senior citizen through such an ordeal. But the audience will remember it.
Posted May 21, 2025  Edit critic review
The Surfer (2024) Kelly Vance Gone are the joyous comic-book machismo of Little Junior Brown in Kiss of Death, the low-rent bent-cop lunacy of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans... By contrast, The Surfer is the definition of miscellaneous.
Posted May 05, 2025  Edit critic review
La Cocina (2024) Jeffrey Edalatpour When a pipe bursts and floods the space, the camera captures a farcical ballet choreographed by a gleeful demon. The scene rivals the best moments from Marx Brothers’ films like Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera.
Posted Apr 09, 2025  Edit critic review
Locked (2025) Kelly Vance Skarsgård struggles with slack-a-daisical pacing in Locked. Even Hopkins, armed with his Hannibal-Lecter-style calmly malevolent line readings, never manages to raise the helter-skelter level much above a dull roar.
Posted Mar 25, 2025  Edit critic review
Black Bag (2025) Kelly Vance Congratulations to Soderbergh, Koepp and company for turning in a 93-minute movie matched perfectly with a 93-minute plot line. No extravagant padding here.
Posted Mar 14, 2025  Edit critic review
I'm Still Here (2024) Kelly Vance Actor Torres has the face and demeanor of a true Mother Courage. And Salles’ restrained character study is a worthy successor to his socially relevant dramas The Motorcycle Diaries and Central Station.
Posted Feb 06, 2025  Edit critic review
A Complete Unknown (2024) Kelly Vance From its casting to its settings to its all-important musical choices, James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is an electrifying, irresistibly engaging portrait of one of America’s unique originals, Bob Dylan.
Posted Dec 28, 2024  Edit critic review
Nosferatu (2024) Kelly Vance The moody black-and-white cinematography of Jarin Blaschke is the best reason to stay with this well-intentioned tribute to the vampires of the past.
Posted Dec 28, 2024  Edit critic review
Gladiator II (2024) Kelly Vance Filmmaker Scott's visuals are as sumptuous (and obviously expensive) as usual, but this is plainly a rehash of familiar material.
Posted Dec 16, 2024  Edit critic review
Heretic (2024) Kelly Vance Hugh Grant isn’t used to being mixed up in a screenplay quite as messy and perplexing as Heretic’s is.
Posted Nov 08, 2024  Edit critic review
My Old Ass (2024) Kelly Vance The most pleasant surprise of the late summer.
Posted Oct 30, 2024  Edit critic review
Megalopolis (2024) Kelly Vance Megalopolis never quite finds the right rhythm for its laborious critique of timeless immorality, but... Coppola still finds meaning in social commentary. And Coppola’s throwaway scenes are more worth seeing than most directors’ best.
Posted Sep 30, 2024  Edit critic review
The Substance (2024) Kelly Vance No actor alive could make this dopey mise-en-scène work.
Posted Sep 18, 2024  Edit critic review
Werewolf Serenade (2024) Jordan Cooper The film is entertaining and easy to watch. Sitting in a theater, out of the summer heat, knowing one doesn’t have to look very far for the jokes or the Easter eggs may just make one want to howl at the moon.
Posted Sep 09, 2024  Edit critic review
Widow Clicquot (2023) Jeffrey Edalatpour Widow Clicquot isn’t [Bennett's] first starring role, but it provides her with an opportunity to carry a feature film in which a solitary woman dismantles the patriarchy.
Posted Aug 20, 2024  Edit critic review
Cuckoo (2024) Kelly Vance An endlessly derivative assault of grotesqueries in the service of what is essentially the tale of a custody battle. The violence, physical as well as emotional, grows wearisome.
Posted Aug 12, 2024  Edit critic review
Sing Sing (2023) Kelly Vance It apparently wants to avoid being just another version of the overly familiar “coach/teacher vs. troublesome students/athletes/juvenile delinquents” scenario... And it succeeds, mostly because of Domingo’s performance as Divine G.
Posted Aug 08, 2024  Edit critic review
Kinds of Kindness (2024) Kelly Vance All three episodes could function as genre parodies, none of them nearly as much fun as Poor Things. Kinds of Kindness is more of a misconceived malpractice farce.
Posted Jul 01, 2024  Edit critic review
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) Kelly Vance Exuberance alone can’t quite carry the burden, especially the fifth time around. The franchise peaked with Fury Road. This spectacle is running out of gas.
Posted Jun 04, 2024  Edit critic review
Evil Does Not Exist (2023) Kelly Vance If Drive My Car was the tragedy of a modern man, Evil Does Not Exist is modern man’s comeuppance, served magnificently chilled.
Posted May 15, 2024  Edit critic review
Civil War (2024) Kelly Vance Garland obviously did his research, even though Civil War adds up to little more than semi-political popcorn. Kudos to actors Dunst, Moura and Spaeny.
Posted Apr 18, 2024  Edit critic review
Kim's Video (2023) Kelly Vance Redmon and Sabin’s doc claims the story of the Kim’s Video diaspora is an “overlap of art, crime and cinema.” It lives up to that description, in an amiably sloppy way.
Posted Apr 12, 2024  Edit critic review
Carol Doda Topless at the Condor (2024) Kelly Vance Just when it seems that San Francisco’s dope, sex and rock ’n’ roll scene in the 1960s has been covered from every conceivable angle, along comes Marlo McKenzie and Jonathan Parker’s entertaining documentary... to remind everyone how untamed it could be.
Posted Mar 21, 2024  Edit critic review
Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros (2023) Jeffrey Edalatpour A dialogue about asparagus, passionfruit and rhubarb turns into a philosophical and artistic inquiry about technique, appearance and taste. The pace of the exchange rivals every Éric Rohmer movie.
Posted Mar 21, 2024  Edit critic review
The American Society of Magical Negroes (2024) Kelly Vance Frustrating but ultimately rewarding.
Posted Mar 14, 2024  Edit critic review
Cabrini (2024) Kelly Vance In modern-day secular terms, Cabrini achieves a gratifying balance between the social and the spiritual in Mother Cabrini’s zealous championing of equality for the underdog.
Posted Mar 08, 2024  Edit critic review
Drive-Away Dolls (2024) Kelly Vance The clipped dialogue readings that sounded so archly appropriate in Inside Llewyn Davis or Barton Fink instead here suggest that this half of the much-heralded Coen Brothers team is suddenly out of ideas. Tedium sets in.
Posted Feb 23, 2024  Edit critic review
The Taste of Things (2023) Jeffrey Edalatpour The Taste of Things is, after all, a Juliette Binoche film. From Three Colours: Blue to Let the Sunshine In, the actress carries an air of tragedy around her neck like a sheer gossamer scarf.
Posted Feb 13, 2024  Edit critic review
The Zone of Interest (2023) Kelly Vance Simply put, the weight of the Holocaust is too heavy for Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. It has trouble standing alone.
Posted Jan 11, 2024  Edit critic review
American Fiction (2023) Kelly Vance Jeffrey Wright, who has played everything from slippery spies to fall guys in a career as one of the screen’s most incisive character actors, enjoys one of the best-written roles of the year, as a man forced to live with a success he finds ridiculous.
Posted Dec 20, 2023  Edit critic review
Poor Things (2023) Kelly Vance After its iffy first half, Poor Things emerges as a revelation.
Posted Dec 06, 2023  Edit critic review
Napoleon (2023) Kelly Vance Volumes have been written about Scott and the lasting effect his visual sense has had on contemporary big-screen entertainment. Napoleon belongs in the front rank of his creations, alongside such landmarks as Blade Runner, Alien and Black Hawk Down.
Posted Dec 01, 2023  Edit critic review
May December (2023) Kelly Vance As May December peters out, it’s inescapable that filmmaker Haynes, ordinarily a competent stylist with a flair for stressed-out heroines, went shopping for the wrong story in the wrong place.
Posted Nov 16, 2023  Edit critic review
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) Kelly Vance Scorsese’s first Western spins a vivid tale of greed and murder.
Posted Oct 27, 2023  Edit critic review
Anatomy of a Fall (2023) Kelly Vance Anatomy of a Fall provides no easy answers. With exquisite timing, filmmakers Triet and Harari paint a narrative portrait as complex and multi-layered as life itself.
Posted Oct 19, 2023  Edit critic review
The Art of Eating: The Life of M.F.K. Fisher (2022) Jeffrey Edalatpour The documentary is a competent introduction of Fisher’s life and work to neophytes.
Posted Oct 11, 2023  Edit critic review
The Royal Hotel (2023) Kelly Vance [The Royal Hotel] may have aspired to be more provocative than it actually turns out to be. Its writing problems fatally weigh it down. This trip down under turns out to be a bit of a blunder.
Posted Oct 05, 2023  Edit critic review
Invisible Beauty (2023) Kelly Vance Invisible Beauty is a provocative piece of work about a $1.7 trillion global industry that is often not taken seriously, as well as a tribute to a model with a more-than-glamorous presence.
Posted Sep 28, 2023  Edit critic review
White Building (2021) Kelly Vance The images give Neang’s cityscape a tinge of doomed romanticism.
Posted Sep 21, 2023  Edit critic review
Radical Wolfe (2023) Kelly Vance In a way, Radical Wolfe is a postcard from another land, a stimulating, if ultimately wistful, look back at the last world-famous American reporter and his times.
Posted Sep 14, 2023  Edit critic review
The Owners (2019) Kelly Vance Actor-turned-director Havelka is too young to have experienced Czechoslovakia as a Soviet satellite firsthand, but this film’s flavorful observational social satire is strongly reminiscent of the celebrated “Czech New Wave” of the 1960.
Posted Aug 31, 2023  Edit critic review
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