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FILM It can't be a coincidence that within a week, a pair of films have been released about 35-year-olds who contemplate hooking up with 19-year-olds. That 16-year age gap — with an immature or other otherwise emotionally stunted thirtysomething on one end, and a precocious millennial on the other — is narrow enough to be plausible, but just wide enough to be awkward.Read more »

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FILM A movie called Bachelorette is inevitably going to be accused of riding Bridesmaids' coattails, even if — as it happens — Bachelorette's source-material play was written years before the 2011 comedy hit theaters.Read more »

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FILM After World War II, the hitherto miniscule U.S. market for foreign language films slowly opened up, partly due to G.I.s returning home curious about the countries they'd been stationed in. But mostly it was because bold new voices in European cinema were delivering a new realism that could be sold (even when cut by censors) as more "shocking," "frank," and "shameless" than anything Hollywood would hazard for years yet.Read more »

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TRASH The movies had barely begun when adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories began appearing onscreen. However, that author's closest inheritor, H.P. Lovecraft, sparked no interest from the medium until a good quarter century after he died in 1937 at age 46, a death as premature following a life by all accounts as miserable as his predecessor's. Read more »

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SFJFF This year's San Francisco Jewish Film Festival includes a trio of documentaries inspired by ephemera: hand-scrawled memoirs and journals, decades-old letters, fading photographs, and yellowing newspapers, long-forgotten and crumpled into attics and storage closets.Read more »

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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 »

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FRAMELINE What happens when a human being becomes a meme? This is the question at the heart of Me @ The Zoo, about YouTube celebrity Chris Crocker — destined to be forever known for his sobbing rant imploring the universe to "Leave Britney alone!"Read more »