Faulconer paid $4000 ethics penalty with campaign cash
San Diego mayor 's 2016 political committee covered dinner, airfare, public relations
Matt Potter 3:41 p.m., Sept. 20
Movie Reviews
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The Sound of Silence “muted” by Peter Sarsgaard’s strained expression
Maybe the quiet is surprising instead of fitting, since the movie is all about sound
Director and co-writer Michael Tyburski’s The Sound of Silence is, fittingly enough, a quiet film. In telling the story of a room tuner — a man who solves his clients’ problems by identifying dissonant sounds ...
Fagara: Sisters doing it for themselves
A film told from a feminist point-of-view by three smart, strong, and self-reliant actresses
Occupational Hazard #29, aka The Installment Plan: when a critic oversteps a self-imposed two-film-a-day limit, conks out halfway through a picture, and finishes watching it the next morning. The rating for Heiward Mak’s Fagara was ...
Los Reyes: Dog days and nights
That stuff is thoroughly human
There are two real dogs behind the canine stars of Los Reyes; their names are Football and Chola, and they really do spend their days (and nights) hanging around the titular skate park — the ...
Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles: Keeping it surreal in the land without bread
If I were asked to name ten favorite filmmakers who forever changed the face of cinema, Buñuel would be five of them.
Luis Buñuel’s third film, Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread), was the director’s only documentary. For his first feature, visual effects designer Salvador Simó’s Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles puts into cartoon motion an ...
Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo: More dead hippies
All the viewer needs to know about the political climate is established in the silent two-minute launching shot.
The opening shot is a film’s calling card, an image of introduction. The best of them shape, inform, and herald the tone for what lies ahead. So instead of wasting an audience’s time with an ...
One Child Nation: People v. Policy
How China went about preventing 338 million births between 1979 and 2015
There are a great many talking heads in Nanfu Wang and Lynn Zhang’s One Child Nation, a documentary devoted to exploring how exactly China went about preventing 338 million births between 1979 and 2015, when ...
The Reports on Sarah and Saleem: an unfamiliar lover
A handily played round of “guess who’s coming to Shabbat dinner”
“There are millions of Jewish guys you could have chosen,” barista Ronit (Rebecca Esmeralda Telhami) admonishes her Israeli employer Sarah (Sivan Kerchner), “Are you that desperate? With an Arab?” Sarah’s difficulty in answering the question ...
How Mike Wallace helped turn TV news into show business
The guy who goes there, who asks the difficult, or embarrassing, or even just personal question
Remember 60 Minutes, America’s first TV news magazine? Remember its tenacious terrier of a host, Mike Wallace, he of the insistent, accusatory question? Yes? No? C’mon, the guy interviewed Putin just a few years ago. ...
Leonard Cohen’s “So Long Marianne” muse
Credit the acid, speed, and sunshine for helping to fuel his “spiritual search.”
There’s no mention of Robert Altman’s breathtakingly grimy McCabe and Mrs. Miller in Nick Broomfield’s (Lily Tomlin, Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, Whitney: Can I Be Me) latest celebrity biodoc, Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love. ...
The Lion King: Unlively action
Why on earth are a bunch of real animals celebrating the birth of a new apex predator?
Remember when you were a kid and your parents told you they were going to take you to a movie and you responded by asking, your voice leaping with a combination of hope and trepidation, ...
Christo goes Walking on Water
His passion exhibited: unfeigned, childlike excitement for the work at hand
Say this for Walking on Water, Andrey Paounov’s documentary on the installation artist Christo’s 2016 effort to mount an enormous orange floating pier on the surface of northern Italy’s Lake Iseo: there are no talking ...
