Email Author Sherilyn Connelly

2013 Stories by Sherilyn Connelly

• "Midnight's Children": Salman Rushdie's Magic Baby Boom

  published May 15, 2013

  Deepa Metha's Midnight's Children may have been better served by the miniseries format, allowing Salman Rushdie's sprawling source novel... More >>

• "Kiss of the Damned": Vampire Movies in the Old French Style

  published May 8, 2013

  Xan Cassevetes's Kiss of the Damned is a loving homage to the Euro-horror genre of the 1960s and 1970s, films like Jess Franco's 1971... More >>

• "Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's": Documenting That Store You Never Got Past the Windows Of

  published May 8, 2013

  There's a potentially interesting, broad-appeal documentary to be made about the high-end New York department store Bergdorf Goodman, but... More >>

• "The Source Family": A '60s Cult Minus the Mass Death

  published May 1, 2013

  The accepted hindsight is that the hippie dream ended with the Manson Family murders in 1969, but that ending wasn't quite as apparent in the... More >>

• "The Reluctant Fundamentalist": Which came First, the Terrorist or the Profiling?

  published May 1, 2013

  Films that have dealt with the events of 9/11 tend to focus on the bravery of the people who were there, while a far less popular topic is the... More >>

• "At Any Price": Death of a Corn Salesman

  published May 1, 2013

  Ramin Bahrani's exercise in miserablism At Any Price wants to be about many things, but the overriding theme is that being a family... More >>

• Stage and Screen: The PlayGround Film Festival Commits Plays to Celluloid

  published May 1, 2013

  Anthology films are always a dicey proposition (witness last year's disjointed and overly slick Stars in Shorts), but the second annual... More >>

• Our Must-See Films at This Year's San Francisco International Film Festival

  published April 24, 2013

  Narrative Computer Chess May 2 & 4 at Sundance Kabuki Cinema Andrew Bujalski's... More >>

• "Mud": Matthew McConaughey and Those Terrible Women

  published April 24, 2013

  Here's the thing: Not every movie has to be a feminist tract or even have a female hero, but it is hard to ignore that Jeff Nichols' Mud... More >>

• Rick Prelinger's "Are We There Yet?" Lets You Yell at the Screen, and the Past

  published April 24, 2013

  The latest from San Francisco-based film archivist Rick Prelinger, No More Road Trips? is a found-footage presentation constructed... More >>

• "Pain & Gain": Michael Bay Gets His T&A

  published April 24, 2013

  In the hands of another director, Pain & Gain could well have been an entertaining little caper flick. In the hands of Michael Bay, it's... More >>

• Tai Chi Hero: Ancient Chinese for "Awesome"

  published April 24, 2013

  A moment early on in Stephen Fung's Tai Chi Hero sets the tone: Not yet having earned the Hero status the movie title gives him, Lu Chan... More >>

• "Blancanieves": Snow White and the Seven Bullfighters

  published April 17, 2013

  There are two kinds of modern-day Snow White retellings: Those that cast actual Little People, and those that use camera tricks and CGI to... More >>

• "Let My People Go!": Finally, a Funny French Sex Comedy

  published April 17, 2013

  In his comic strip Life in Hell, Matt Groening once described cinema's greatest paradox thusly: "The French are funny, sex is funny,... More >>

• Films From The Diaspota

  published April 17, 2013

  The San Francisco International Film Festival may get most of the ink, but it isn’t the only world-spanning film festival happening this... More >>

• "My Brother the Devil": Wanting to Be Like Big Brother

  published April 10, 2013

  First-time directors often work in existing genres for their feature debuts, and up to a certain point, Sally El Hosaini's My Brother the... More >>

• "Upstream Color": Life Inside an Ageless Organism

  published April 10, 2013

  Early on in Upstream Color, a woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) sits at a computer and works on a CGI rendering of some impossible creature... More >>

• "To the Wonder": Terrence Malick's Beautiful Pondering

  published April 10, 2013

  "The magic hour" is a cinematography term for the day's final stretch of sunlight, when the light has certain glowy emotionality. Terence... More >>

• "Trance": Danny Boyle Follows Up the Olympics

  published April 10, 2013

  Directing the opening ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympics cemented Danny Boyle's position as England's top director, trusted to be his... More >>

• "The Place Beyond the Pines": Father/Son Bonding

  published April 3, 2013

  The Globe of Death is a carnival attraction in which daredevils ride motorcycles along the inside of a spherical cage, defying gravity through... More >>

• "6 Souls": Satan-Worshipping Mountain Witches

  published April 3, 2013

  In the opening of the religious-themed horror movie 6 Souls, psychiatrist Cara Harding (Julianne Moore) makes a reference to... More >>

• "Gimme the Loot": A Day in the Bronx

  published April 3, 2013

  2013 is proving to be a good year for micro-budgeted, deeply-felt comedies about teenagers in the Bronx. Hot on the heels of Michel Gondry's... More >>

• "The Silence": The Past is Creepy

  published March 27, 2013

  Is there any more ominous cinematic portent of doom than a carnival? Especially a carnival with a big scary clown head? First-time director... More >>

• "Mental": Free Spirits Down Under

  published March 27, 2013

  Australian director PJ Hogan's Mental is a muddled but well-meaning comedy, though exactly what it means to do is not entirely clear.... More >>

• "Wrong": A Surreal Dog Search

  published March 27, 2013

  Absurdism in feature-length films typically only works if there's a character for the audience to identify with, and the protagonist in Quentin... More >>