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Lynn Rapoport

SFIFF report: French glam ... and grit

05.02.13 - 4:00 pm | Lynn Rapoport |
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At the outset of Friday evening’s SFIFF screening of the ’50s-set French film Populaire, director Régis Roinsard offered two hints as to what lay ahead — noting that his SF sightseeing agenda had included a visit to Jimmy Stewart’s Lombard Street Vertigo residence, and encouraging the audience to stick around for a Q&A sampling of his Borat-level English proficiency. As it turned out, Roinsard handled the post-screening questions with slightly awkward but un-Borat-like charm (and occasional interpreter assistance). And the film itself — while featuring a man gripped by a daffy obsession involving a beautiful blond, who, come to think of it, is often seen sporting an updo — has a considerably lighter mood than the Hitchcock thriller, finding its tense plot turns and clacking rhythms within the fast-paced world of competitive typing.

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Out for more

Frameline celebrates 20 years of "New Queer Cinema" — and beyond

06.12.12 - 5:29 pm | Lynn Rapoport |
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arts@sfbg.com

FRAMELINE It was Blue (1993) and Swoon (1992) and Frisk (1995), or My Own Private Idaho (1991) and The Hours and Times (1991). Paris Is Burning (1990). The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995).Read more »

SFIFF 2012: gone but not forgotten

05.10.12 - 2:34 pm | Lynn Rapoport |
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It’s been a week since the San Francisco International Film Festival ended, but after 15 days largely spent sitting in the dark at the Kabuki, submerged in a flood of cinematic storytelling, the afterimages are still taking up considerable space in my brain.

And questions remain, like: Why didn’t anyone from Lauren Greenfield’s crew on the documentary The Queen of Versailles report time-share mogul David Siegel or his wife, Jackie, to the Orlando-area SPCA for casually sitting down to brunch and letting their family’s pet python roam unchaperoned through a house filled with fluffy white purse dogs?

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Crazy, sexy (?), movies

YEAR IN FILM: Parsing the po-mo rom-com

12.27.11 - 6:40 pm | Lynn Rapoport |
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arts@sfbg.com

YEAR IN FILM We ask depressingly little of our romantic comedies, particularly considering that they're meant, one guesses, to cheer us up. While genres like the action thriller and the disaster film engage in an arms race of catastrophe that, while riddled with clichés, requires some amount of ingenuity to orchestrate, when it comes to the rom-com, the studios display fierce loyalty to a formula of marquee names, charming emotional baggage, foolish misunderstandings, and final-boarding-call epiphanies.Read more »

Sing out

Musicals take center stage at Frameline 35

06.14.11 - 5:01 pm | Lynn Rapoport |
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Status update

The Social Network pokes into the founding of Facebook

09.28.10 - 4:51 pm | Lynn Rapoport |
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New York story

Do the right thing? Please Give examines the everyday agonies of liberal guilt

05.04.10 - 3:56 pm | Lynn Rapoport |
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FILM The central characters in Nicole Holofcener's new film, Please Give, Manhattan couple Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt), display a fluency in the language of large round numbers that is occasionally disturbed by bouts of self-inflicted sticker shock. Read more »

Moore and less

Atom Egoyan's uneven call-girl tale, Chloe

03.23.10 - 5:34 pm | Lynn Rapoport |
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FILM The people in Atom Egoyan's movies have a tendency to be hiding things — pieces of their history, damages inflicted along the way, and complex motivations that are keys to our understanding of how the lives in a knotted web intersect and affect one another. We follow these expressive yet withholding characters, often back and forth through time, and collect subjective and fractional versions of the truth. Read more »

"Remember Me" is -- you guessed it -- forgettable

03.12.10 - 2:51 pm | Lynn Rapoport |
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Ominously set in New York City during the summer of 2001, Remember Me, starring Robert Pattinson (of the Twilight series) and Emilie de Ravin (of TV's Lost), pretty much answers the question of whether it’s still too soon to make the events of September 11 the subject of a date movie.

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Citizen Welles

Richard Linklater's latest peeps the stage-bound early years of the movie genius
12.09.09 - 2:47 am | Lynn Rapoport |
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FILM It's 1937, and New York City, like the rest of the nation, presumably remains in the grip of the Great Depression. That trifling historical detail, however, is upstaged in Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles (adapted from the novel by Robert Kaplow) by the doings at the newly founded Mercury Theatre. Read more »