This week, an interview with director-actor-screenwriter Robert Townsend on the occasion of his residency at the Balboa and 4 Star theaters, starting Wednesday with Hollywood Shuffle on 35mm: www.screenslate.com/articles/im-...

"I'm a true hyphen": An Interview with Robert Townsend

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...

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SFC proudly announces CROSSROADS 2026, September 4–6 at Gray Area. 49 works of film, video & performance by 52 artists representing 22 countries and territories, presented across 8 curated programs. www.sfcinematheque.org/crossroads/c... #XRDS26 #experimentalfilm #filmfestival

Less than 2k to go for ATA to reach their goal!

Screen Slate SF Bay@screenslatesf.bsky.social · 2w ago

Folks! Artists' Television Access @ataconnect.bsky.social needs one last push to clear enough backrent for their landlord to forgive the rest! Get them to their goal by August 1st! www.every.org/ataconnect/f...

This week, Bernardo Rondeau on King Vidor's 1949 The Fountainhead, screening in a matinee Tuesday, July 28, at the Orinda: www.screenslate.com/articles/fou...

The Fountainhead

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...

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🎬 BIG NEWS! San Francisco Film Preserve is bringing the inaugural Re:Vision: Festival of Restoration and Rediscovery to the historic Roxie Theater from September 24–27! filmpreserve.org/rev... 1/5

Folks! Artists' Television Access @ataconnect.bsky.social needs one last push to clear enough backrent for their landlord to forgive the rest! Get them to their goal by August 1st! www.every.org/ataconnect/f...

This week, Shelby Shaw on the @sfcinematheque.bsky.social's "A Thing Brilliant and Powerful: Films on Gesture, Paint and Painting" at SFMOMA this Thursday, July 23, feat. short films by Cauleen Smith, Stan Brakhage, and others, and in memory of Fred Worden: www.screenslate.com/articles/thi...

A Thing Brilliant and Powerful: Films on Gesture, Paint and Painting

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,...

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This week, an interview by Cat Beckstrand with Brydie O’Conner, director of Barbara Forever, and Florrie Burke, Barbara Hammer’s partner of many decades, for the doc’s local premier at Frameline: www.screenslate.com/articles/tur...

Turning the Camera On: Barbara Hammer from Birth to Death

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...

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'Time After Time' plays the Vogue June 13 with director Nicholas Meyer in attendance! Love this film and 💯 agree with @kieferama.bsky.social about everything but the on-screen chemistry. Never seen a more awkward kiss in my life. www.screenslate.com/articles/tim...

Time After Time

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...

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This week, @woahitsjuanito.bsky.social on Amanda Kramer's By Design, a very different kind of body swap movie, screening Wednesday at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission.

By Design

There’s something all too alluring in the idea of being an inanimate object, beloved by those who use and abuse those often fragile beauties. Amanda Kramer’s By Design (2025) literalizes that concept ...

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Screen Slate has a new preview of OUR HITLER, screening at BAMPFA this Saturday, May 16, at 1:30 PM. 🎬 Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s 1977 film is one of the most ambitious works in the series. Read the preview and get tickets at bampfa.org/event/our-hitler or the link in bio. ✨

This week, @commuter4film.bsky.social on a very rare screening of Our Hitler a.k.a. Hitler: A Film From Germany, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's monumental, 7+ hour smorgasbord (including puppets), playing once and only once this Saturday at @bampfa.bsky.social

Our Hitler a.k.a. Hitler: A Film From Germany

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s German Trilogy is about men who put on a show for the nation as it slowly descends into a self-made hell. The first two entries are about relatively sympathetic figures: Ludwig...

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The Silent Film Fest starts tonight!

Screen Slate SF Bay@screenslatesf.bsky.social · 3mo ago

This week, @feuilladist.bsky.social on deeper cuts at this year's SF Silent Film Festival, including films from the too-often overlooked 1910s, a city symphony avant la lettre, and— "the true hidden gem of the festival"—the (probably) first German feature directed by a woman:

This week, @feuilladist.bsky.social on deeper cuts at this year's SF Silent Film Festival, including films from the too-often overlooked 1910s, a city symphony avant la lettre, and— "the true hidden gem of the festival"—the (probably) first German feature directed by a woman:

The 2026 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

I take for granted that readers of Screen Slate need little encouragement when it comes to the marquee titles in this year’s edition of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. A screening of F.W. Murn...

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This week, Whitney Strub covers a floating screening series that feels vital right now—Newsreel: Collective Fragments of Living Struggle—showing late 60s leftist agitprop documentary shorts about community organizing, marches, strikes, riot, many of them of local interest.

Revolution Then and Now: Discussing “Newsreel: Collective Fragments of Living Struggle” with tooth

Newsreel was effectively the agitprop documentary wing of the late-1960s U.S. New Left and its films were never meant to be viewed alone at home on a laptop. Mostly bypassing commercial distribution, ...

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It's opening day of the 69th SFFILM Festival! We've got write-ups for five movies, among many, that we think are worth checking out, starting with The Arch, a nearly forgotten, newly rediscovered Hong Kong New Wave masterpiece from 1968: www.screenslate.com/articles/arch

The Arch

Hong Kong New Wave before Hong Kong New Wave, The Arch (1970) by Cecile Tang Shu Shuen was one of the first Chinese-language films to receive international critical acclaim and ranks among Hong Kong’s...

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In case anyone missed the news: tonight's screening of People's Park in black hole cinematheque's Newsreel series has been delayed to Thursday at Bathers Library. The screening of Columbia Revolt is still scheduled for Friday at 34 Trinity. www.screenslate.com/series/newsr...

Screen Slate SF Bay@screenslatesf.bsky.social · 4mo ago

And the roundup, feat. Spielberg A.I. on 35, Maciej Drygas tours an archival train doc around the bay, Amy Goodman makes one more Roxie stop, the Vogue has 3D desert noir Inferno, @hitfactorypod.bsky.social hosts WTO/99 director Ian Bell at the Balboa, 100 Lumiéres screen at the Smith Rafael, & more

For this week's feature, Shelby Shaw on “Constructions / Destructions / Instructions," six films by Gordon Matta-Clark screening tomorrow (Tuesday, April 21st), presented by @sfcinematheque.bsky.social at @grayarea.org:

Constructions / Destructions / Instructions: The Films of Gordon Matta-Clark

Art history is easier to learn when artists and artworks are siloed into genres and movements: the chance happenings of Fluxus, the cultural appropriation of Pop Art, the postwar middle finger to trad...

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"...a fervent examination of Pakistan’s visual culture and a significant document of these women’s lives, thoughts, desires, dialects, habits, and styles—all of which are under constant threat of erasure." This week's pick: Showgirls of Pakistan, Sun. at the Roxie with the director in person.

Showgirls of Pakistan

Much like Saad Khan’s archival project “Khajistan,” Showgirls of Pakistan (2020) is adorned by a maximalistic, kitschy, almost otherworldly aesthetic. The documentary follows the lives of three Mujra ...

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This week, Connor Burns on The Shoes of the Fisherman, screening Sunday at the Orinda Theatre in their Wide Screen Road Show series: www.screenslate.com/articles/sho...

The Shoes of the Fisherman

Recent years have seen fresh, imaginative depictions of the leader of the Catholic Church. Paolo Sorrentino’s HBO series gave us a Young Pope, while Edward Berger’s Conclave teased a Vaping Pope and u...

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Shapeshifters is 2/3 of the way to their goal. Keep it going!

Screen Slate SF Bay@screenslatesf.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Shapeshifters Cinema is an absolutely essential home for the Bay Area's film-going and film-making community and needs to fundraise $60k in the next two weeks. Help them out and spread the news!

This week, Lucrecia Martel, interviewed by Andrea Avidad, on her new film Nuestra Tierra, upcoming in a career retrospective of her work at @bampfa.bsky.social that begins Saturday afternoon with La Ciénaga on 35mm: www.screenslate.com/articles/sha...

On Shaking Up Perception: An Interview with Lucrecia Martel

Long before the contemporary use of the trendy adjective “immersive” appeared in all sorts of descriptions that try to convince us to buy an experience, let’s say, spend a ridiculous amount of money p...

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This week, Joe Dante is in person at the Orinda Theater for screenings of Gremlins 2, Inner Space, and our feature this week, his love letter to schlocky B movies, Matinee www.screenslate.com/articles/mat...

Matinee

A Joe Dante film reliably delivers plots involving a particular brand of American normalcy upended in chaotic fashion, dazzling practical effects, cinephilic easter eggs, and, of course, guest spots f...

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This week, Patrick Dahl on Redacted, Brian De Palma's staged media montage of real American war crimes, screening Sunday at @grayarea.org as part of the series The Bush Years: www.screenslate.com/articles/red...

Redacted

Brian De Palma’s Redacted (2007) is a hideous little movie about a hideous, gargantuan war that sidesteps most of the trapdoors that collapse even ostensibly peace-mongering war films into propaganda.

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This week, our feature is Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Kenneth Anger's hypersaturated Thelemic ritual-cum-film, playing alongside Luminous Procuress, a local-legendary piece of acid-washed genderfuckery, at @bampfa.bsky.social on Saturday afternoon: www.screenslate.com/articles/ina...

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) is a spell preserved in cinema that lavishly presents the occult currents that fascinated the filmmaker throughout his life. A devotee of Thele...

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One of the most essential venues for experimental film and video, with an emphasis on expanded cinema, in the country, I’d argue!

Screen Slate SF Bay@screenslatesf.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Shapeshifters Cinema is an absolutely essential home for the Bay Area's film-going and film-making community and needs to fundraise $60k in the next two weeks. Help them out and spread the news!

Shapeshifters Cinema is an absolutely essential home for the Bay Area's film-going and film-making community and needs to fundraise $60k in the next two weeks. Help them out and spread the news!

Donate to Support Shapeshifters Cinema, Brewery & Café, organized by Shapeshifters Cinema, Brewery and Café

All around us we are witnessing the collapse of the San Franc… Shapeshifters Cinema, Brewery and Café needs your support for Support Shapeshifters Cinema, Brewery & Café

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For reasons that should be obvious—namely, him being an easy contender for the greatest documentarian, period, no qualifiers—Wiseman is a director Screen Slate has covered a lot over the years. In honor of the master, here's a roundup of those pieces, starting with today's feature, on 1976's Meat:

Screen Slate SF Bay@screenslatesf.bsky.social · 6mo ago

This week, by bittersweet coincidence, our feature pick is Frederick Wiseman's Meat, the last film in the @bampfa.bsky.social Wiseman retrospective, written up by Wiseman Podcast host Arlin Golden. www.screenslate.com/articles/meat

This week, by bittersweet coincidence, our feature pick is Frederick Wiseman's Meat, the last film in the @bampfa.bsky.social Wiseman retrospective, written up by Wiseman Podcast host Arlin Golden. www.screenslate.com/articles/meat

Meat

The United States reached its peak beef consumption in 1976, reaching just shy of 95 lbs per capita. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1976 was also the bicentennial, a nationwide birthday party that permea...

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This week, Bernardo Rondeau on When the Wind Blows, Jimmy T. Murakami's animated adaptation of Raymond Briggs’s apocalyptic graphic novel, screening tonight and Sunday at the Roxie: www.screenslate.com/articles/whe...

When The Wind Blows

The animated feature When the Wind Blows began as Raymond Briggs’s 1982 graphic novel about Jim and Hilda Bloggs, pensioners in the quiet, leafy Sussex countryside, preparing for the bomb—and for what...

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