movie gourmet

Surf and Skate at the 2025 SLO Film Fest

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Photo caption: Surf Nite in SLO. Courtesy of the SLO Film Fest.

This year’s SLO Film Fest, opening April 24, once again presents the richest Surf/Skate program that I’ve ever seen at a mainstream film festival. In fact, the SLO Film Festival dedicates its Friday night and Saturday night showcase screenings at the Fremont Theater to Surf/Skate events – that’s respect. Here are the highlights.

The always popular Surf Nite in SLO features three surfing short films with gnarly waves. Expect the Fremont Theater to be packed again with surfers enjoying drinks in the lobby and the Riff Tide surf band before the screening. The films are:

  • Making Waves: The Lakey Peterson Story profiles 805-native Lakey Peterson and her experiences on the World Surf League Championship Tour.
  • Creatures of Habit explores extreme cold water surfing,
  • NØ WAY involves even colder water and is described as “an antithesis to The Endless Summer“. It follows a band of surfers in the Barents Sea, which is between the northernmost coasts of Norway, Finland and Russia and the Arctic Ocean
Leandre Sanders in SKATEGOAT. Courtesy of SLO Film Fest.

For the second year, SLO Film Fest celebrates the culture and cinema of skateboarding with its Community of Skate program:

  • The feature film Skategoat profiles Leandre Sanders, whose passion for skateboarding led him to escape a crime-ridden and impoverished environment to become an international skateboarding superstar. Sanders will appear personally, along with the director, Van Alpert.
  • The short film Against the Current airs the reflections of skate icon and filmmaker Stacy Peralta on his own artistic journey. A surfer and one of the pioneers of modern skateboarding, Peralta, directed Dogtown and Z-boys and Riding Giants, wrote Lords of Dogtown, and founded the Powell Peralta skateboard product company. 
  • A post-screening panel with pro skaters Leandre Sanders and Chico Brenes, skate film director Aaron Meza, and Skategoat director Van Alpert.
  • An exhibition of skateboard designs and live-screen printing by the San Luis Obispo High School Advanced Graphic Design class. 
Photo caption: Jack Johnson in THE CIGARETTE SURFBOARD. Courtesy of SLO Film Fest.

The fest’s program also includes the enviro documentary feature The Cigarette Surfboard. To raise consciousness about the environmental impact of cigarette butts (which is really, really bad), an activist builds and displays a functioning surfboard made out of 10,000 discarded cigarette butts picked up on the beach.  Backed by a community of surfers, scientists and surfer-scientists, he tours the world, seeking a ban on cigarette filters. Impressively, the Ciggy Board even survives Mavericks. The butt-gathering, surfboard building and local politics happens in Santa Cruz. This doc has racked up awards at many film festivals (even at one in Bulgaria).

Check out the program and get your tickets at SLO Film Fest. Here are the trailers for Skategoat and The Cigarette Surfboard.

Movies to See Right Now

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CHEVALIER. Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing and SFFILM.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – The 2025 SFFILM is beginning, so here are my recommendations in Under the Radar at SFFILM. Plus, here are two great choices to watch at home: the engrossing 2002 French drama Man on the Train (Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango, YouTube) and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s sly and pointed exploration of male competitiveness, Chevalier (Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango, YouTube).

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Anthony Quinn in BARABBAS

Easter always triggers television networks to pull out their Biblical epics. If you’re going to watch just one Sword-and-Sandal classic, I recommend going full tilt with Barrabas, broadcast by Turner Classic Movies on April 20. This 1961 cornball stars Anthony Quinn as the Zelig-like title character.

The story begins with the thief Barabbas avoiding crucifixion when Pontius Pilate swaps him out for Jesus (this part is actually in the Bible). Because the Crucifixion isn’t enough action for a two-hour 17-minute movie, Barabbas is soon sent off as a slave to the salt mines, where he is rescued by a miraculously timely earthquake. He then joins the Roman gladiators, complete with a javelin-firing squad, gets lost in the catacombs and emerges to the Burning of Rome. He has encounters with the Emperor Nero and the Apostle Peter before he converts to Christianity – just in time for the mass crucifixion. Watch for an uncredited Sharon Tate as a patrician in the arena.

SFFILM Festival: three international gems

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Photo caption: Marina Fois in MAGMA. Courtesy of SFFILM.

This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) opens on Thursday and runs through April 27. There are plenty of big events, including the opening night Rebuilding starring Josh O’Connor (Challengers, La Chimera, The Crown) and Andre Holland appearing to receive an award and present his latest film Love, Brooklyn. However, don’t overlook the international cinema at SFFILM – here are three gems.

  • Magma: Marina Fois plays the leader of the scientific team that monitors the active volcano on Guadeloupe. She is seasoned, confident and not prone to panic. The government relies on her to counsel whether and when an upcoming eruption will force evacuation of island residents – and the politicians are not comfortable interpreting her probabilities. While no one wants to endanger lives, everyone remembers an evacuation that went horribly wrong in 1976. So, the stakes are high, and she is the public face of the decision to evacuate or not. When the government overreacts, her job gets much tougher. The clock ticks and the pressure builds in this taut 82-minute thrill ride, as director Cypriot Vial, who co-wrote, unspools the action. The performances by Fois and Theo Christine as her grad student assistant are fantastic. Magma won the SFFILM award for depicting science in a narrative film.
  • Triumph: Looking for a new role after the fall of communism, Bulgarian army leaders follow a psychic’s advice to burrow into the earth in search of a portal to a space alien’s mothership. If this seems farfetched, look up the historical event called “The Tsarichina Hole” (illustrated in the closing credits). Following the East European filmmaking tradition of exposing the absurdities in communist bureaucracy, directors and co-writers Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov pile on layers of droll hilarity. The psychic gets everyone to adopt pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo like “deactimation“. The army commander in charge brings his disturbed teen daughter (Maria Bakalova of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm), who has her own awakenings and begins to out-psychic the psychic.
  • Rains Over Babel: In her stunning debut feature, writer-director Gala del Sol takes us into an imagined world of Cali, Columbia, bars connected to the Underworld (not the just criminal underworld), ruled by a sexy loan shark who is the Grim Reaper. Among the denizens are a sleek and smarmy bartender, a prudish preacher, a gangland enforcer who’s been dead for twenty years, a talking salamander and more drag queens than you can shake a stick at. The story, fraught with desperation and Faustian bargains, flies by. Del Sol says she marries magic realism with gritty realism, and Rains Over Babel is visually orgiastic. The intricate production designs of the interiors could be by a demented Wes Anderson. The sound design is jarring and totally original. As an auteur, Gala del Sol is thinking so far outside of the box that you can’t tell that there’s a box.
Maria Bakalova in TRIUMPH. Courtesy of SFFILM and Bankside Films.

.The menu at SFFILM Festival includes 150 films from more than 50 countries. Peruse the program and buy tickets at SFFILM. Here’s the teaser for Rains Over Babel.

MAN ON THE TRAIN: an unlikely bonding

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Photo caption: Jean Rochefort and Johnny Hallyday in MAN ON THE TRAIN.

The engrossing 2002 French drama Man on the Train centers on portraits of two very different men, and, ultimately, an unexpected male bonding. There’s a thriller ending because each man has been moving to his separate pivotal, life-or-death moment.

The titular character (Johnny Hallyday), whose name we come to learn is Milan, arrives in a small provincial town, and his accommodations fall through. The local literature teacher Manesquier (Jean Rochefort) insists on putting him up for the night. Milan, a very private man of fewer than few words, accepts the favor only reluctantly. He’s a solitary guy anyway, and he’s keeping a low profile because his local business matter is illegal. Manesquier, who lives a lonely bachelor existence, has a lot to say and no one to say it to. He is delighted to have someone to share company, and he is even more fascinated when he discovers that Milan is a career criminal.

Driven by Manesquier’s curiosity, and against Milan’s initial wishes, the two get to know each other. We know that the clock is ticking for one man, but we don’t appreciate that it my be ticking for both.

Man on the Train works so well because of the casting and the performances.

Jean Rochefort was a chameleonic fixture in French cinema. Man on the Train was Rochefort’s 130th movie at age 72, and he would go on to make 36 more. I recently wrote of Rochefort’s performance forty years before as a particularly amoral character with a reptilian smugness in Symphony for a Massacre.

Johnny Hallyday, in contrast, was not most well-known as a screen actor, but as a pop singer, the French Elvis. Ironically, Hallyday’s first film was as a child in the suspense classic Diabolique, which also was his best film; like Elvis Presley, Hallyday dabbled in an indifferent movie career. Halliday made 78 music videos with Johnny Hallyday in the title. He was known as a hard-living tabloid celebrity. When he made Man on the Train, Hallyday was 59 and had some serious mileage on him. Yet, his magnetism is compelling in Man on the Train.

Man on the Train was directed by Patrice Leconte (Monsieur Hire, The Widow of St. Pierre, The Suicide Shop).

Man on a Train can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango and YouTube.

CHEVALIER – male competitiveness, brilliantly skewered

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CHEVALIER. Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing and SFFILM.

To celebrate this week’s opening of SFFILM, here’s a gem from the 2016 SFFILM, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier, a sly and pointed exploration of male competitiveness, with the moments of drollness and absurdity that we expect in the best of contemporary Greek cinema. Tsangari is bringing her newest film Harvest, starring Caleb Landry Jones and Harry Melling, to to the 2025 SFFILM.

In Chevalier, six guys are taking a holiday week on a yacht in the Aegean Sea. Each has his own stateroom, and the crew includes a chef. They spend their days scuba diving, jet skiing and the like. After a post-dinner game of charades, one suggests that they play Chevalier, a game about “Who is best overall?”. Of course, men tend to be competitive, and their egos are now at stake. The six guys began appraising each other, and their criteria get more and more absurd. “How many fillings do you have?”

In one especially inspired set piece, the guys race each other to construct IKEA bookcases, which results in five phallic towers on the boat’s deck (and one drooping failure). Naturally, some of the guys are obsessed with their own erections, too.

Athina Rachel Tsangari, director of CHEVALIER . Photo courtesy of SFFILM.

Director Athina Rachel Tsangari is obviously a keen observer of male behavior. Both men and women will enjoy laughing at male behavior taken to extreme. I sure did. Chevalier is perhaps the funniest movie of 2016, and it’s on my list of Best Movies of 2016.

I saw Chevalier at the 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM), where I pegged it as the Must See of the fest. (In 2011, Tsangari brought her hilariously offbeat Attenberg to SFFILM.)

Make sure you get the 2015 Greek Chevalier, not the 2023 Hollywood bodice-ripper.

Unfortunately, in the Bay Area, Chevalier only got a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it release in 2016. Chevalier is now available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Catrinel Marlon and Vlad Ivanov in THE WHISTLER. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – I’m busy preparing for the San Francisco and San Luis Obispo film festivals that dominate my Aprils. Just like last week, the best six new movies are documentaries; five are about musical, performance and visual artists and the sixth is about a psycho killer. I’ve also highlighted The Whistlers, a neo-noir thriller currently free on Max. Here are my film festival previews:

Reminder: A Complete Unknown now rents for under $6 on Amazon and is free on Hulu. You can also pay more to watch it on AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.

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Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw in THE GETAWAY

Tomorrow, Turner Classic Movies presents The Getaway, a 1972 crime thriller starring the charismatic Steve McQueen and his real-life squeeze Ali MacGraw.  McQueen and MacGraw are delightful to watch as they move between violent clashes and double- and triple-crosses. As befits a Sam Peckinpah film, there’s an intense shootout at the end.  The grossly underrated character actor Al Lettieri (Sollozzo the Turk in The Godfather) gets to play perhaps his most delicious villain; when he comes across a oddly matched married couple – the nubile Sally Struthers and the nerdy Jack Dodson (county clerk Howard Sprague in The Andy Griffith Show). Lettieri layers on some glorious sexual perversity.  

Speaking of character actors, we also get to enjoy the crew of Peckinpah favorites: Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens, Dub Taylor, Bo Hopkins and Richard Bright. My friend Sandy lets Ali McGraw’s lack of acting range get in the way of enjoying The Getaway, but IMO Al Lettieri more than makes up for it.

Sally Struthers, Al Lettieri and Jack Dodson in THE GETAWAY

First look at the 2025 SLO Film Fest

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Photo caption: Neil Young in COASTAL. Courtesy of the SLO Film Festival.

The 2025 SLO Film Fest opens on April 24 and celebrates its 31st festival, bringing its characteristic mix of aspirational cinema and sheer fun to California’s Central Coast. This year’s slate is an intoxicating mix of US and international indies and festival hits fresh from their premieres at Sundance and SXSW. Plus the richest program of surf and skate films of any mainstream film festival. The fest will run through April 29.

This is the first festival since the the SLO Film Center came into being as a collaboration of the SLO Film Festival and the Palm Theatre. Fittingly, the Palm will be showcasing some films and celebrity appearances, with the festival’s biggest events at the Fremont theatre. As usual, most screenings will take place at the Downtown Centre 7. One surfing-oriented feature will screen at the Bay in Morro Bay.

Jay Duplass appearing at the SLO Film Fest, Courtesy of the SLO Film Festival.

Here are festival highlights:

  • The opening night film is the Sundance Audience Award winner, DJ Ahmet.
  • The closing night film will be Coastal, Daryl Hannah’s documentary of the latest Neil Young concert tour. Both Neil Young and Daryl Hannah are expected to appear in person.
  • Director Jay Duplass will appear in person to receive an award and present his SXSW hit The Baltimorons.
  • The biodoc Bob Mackie: A Naked Illusion, with the fashion designer Bob Mackie in attendance for a Q&A at the Palm..
  • The Oscar-nominated documentary Porcelain War.
  • The always popular Surf Night featuring three surfing short films with gnarly waves. Expect the Fremont to be packed again with surfers enjoying drinks in the lobby and the Riff Tide surf band before the screening.
  • Skating culture is celebrated with the second annual Community of Skate – skate films, a panel of pro skaters and skate filmmakers, and a skateboard design exhibition.

There’s plenty more, with features, workshops and six programs of shorts. I’m screening my way through the program, and will post my MUST SEE recommendations before the fest opens. Peruse the program and get your tickets at SLO Film Fest.

DJ AHMET. Courtesy of the SLO Film Festival.

THE WHISTLERS: walking a tightrope of treachery

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Photo caption: Catrinel Marlon and Vlad Ivanov in THE WHISTLER. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

In the absorbing crime thriller The Whistlers, Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) is a shady Romanian cop who is lured into a dangerous plot by the rapturously sexy Gilda (Catrinel Marlon) and the promise of a fortune. A lethal Spanish mafia is planning a Perfect Crime to recover the loot stolen by Gilda and her Romanian partner, Zsolt. Only Zslot knows where the treasure is, and he’s been jailed by Cristi’s colleagues. To beat the omnipresent surveillance of Romanian state security, Cristi is sent to La Gomera, an island in the Spanish Canary Islands to learn a whistling language.

A whistling language? Indeed, residents of La Gomera can communicate by whistling in code. The language is called Silbo Gomera and it was already being used in ancient Roman times. The whistling can be heard for up to two miles, which allows the locals to communicate across the impassable ravines on the mountainous island.

The plan to spring Zsolt depends on Cristi learning Silbo Gomera and then implementing an intricate plan in which nothing can go wrong. Even if the plan goes right, Cristi and Gilda run the very real risk of being killed by the pitiless Spanish mafia or by the corrupt and unaccountable Romanian cops. Cristi and Gilda are walking a tightrope of treachery.

Vlad Ivanov in THE WHISTLERS. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The Whistlers is written and directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, who is a master of the deadpan. Two of his earlier films became art house hits in the US, 12:08 East of Bucharest and Police, Adjective. Both of those films explored fundamental corruption in Romanian society as a legacy of the communist era..

Cristi is played by Romanian actor Vlad Ivanov. Ivanov is best known for the Romanian masterpiece 4 Days, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, in which he played one of cinema’s most repellent characters – Mr. Bebe, the sexual harassing abortionist. American audiences have also seen Ivanov’s performances in Police, Adjective and Snowpiercer.

Ivanov excels in playing Everyman piñatas, which serves him well in The Whistlers. Ivanov delivered a tour de force in the 2019 Cinequest film Hier, as a man more and more consumed by puzzles, and increasingly perplexed, dogged, battered and exhausted.

For The Whistlers to work, Catrinel Marlon must make Gilda quick-thinking and gutsy, and she pulls it off. She is very good, as is Rodica Lazar as Cristi’s coldly ruthless boss Magda.

This is a Romanian film with dialogue in Romanian, English, Spanish and, of course, whistling. The Whistlers, a top notch crime thriller, can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango – and it’s currently included with Max.

First look at the 2025 SFFILM Festival

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Photo caption: Josh O’Connor and Lily LaTorre in Max Walker Silverman’s REBUILDING, screening at the 2025 SFFILM. Courtesy of SFFILM.

This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) opens April 17, and runs through April 27. SFFILM Festival is the longest-running film festival in the Americas, and this year’s fest is the 68th. The Premier Theater at One Letterman will host the Opening, Centerpiece and Closing Nights, and most screenings will take place at the Marina Theatre and the Presidio Theatre. Screenings and events will also take place at BAMFA in Berkeley and at seven other San Francisco venues.

The menu at SFFILM Festival includes 150 films from more than 50 countries. Peruse the program and buy tickets at SFFILM.

Here are some of the more special elements of this year’s SFFILM Festival :

  • Opening night with Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding, a drama starring Josh O’Connor (Challengers, La Chimera, The Crown) as a man whose resilience is challenged by the devastation of wildfires.
  • Actor André Holland will appear to receive a tribute and to showcase his new film Love, Brooklyn. Holland also appears in another SFFILM film, The Dutchman.
  • Director Chris Columbus will appear to receive a tribute and host a screening of his 2005 musical drama Rent.
  • Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari, who brought her her hilariously offbeat Attenberg and her wickedly funny Chevalier to previous SFFILM fests, is here again with her latest, Harvest, starring Harry Melling and Caleb Landry Jones.
  • SFFILM celebrates the treasured Roxie Theater with its 30-yar-old Mel Novikoff Award and a Roxie screening of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, in the year of that movie’s 75th anniversary,
  • One of the deepest documentary sections in recent memory, including fourteen US and thirteen international features.
  • Horror retrospective with The Babadook, Carnival of Souls, They Live, Chain Reactions and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
  • Movies starring Marlee Maitlin, Josh O’Connor, Kate Mara, Andre Holland, Ben Foster, Chloe Sevigny, Danielle Deadwyler, Marina Foïs, Caleb Landry Jones, Harry Melling and Simon Rex.

As usual, I’ll be looking for under-the-radar gems and posting my recommendations just before the fest’s opening

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: George Clinton in WE WANT THE FUNK. Courtesy of Firelight Films.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – new reviews of the insightful Andy Kaufman biodoc Thank You Very Much, the delightful music doc We Want the Funk and the indie drama Nora. The best six new movies are documentaries; five are about musical, performance and visual artists and the sixth is about a psycho killer.

A Complete Unknown now rents for under $6 on Amazon and is free on Hulu. You can also pay more to watch it on AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.

REMEMBRANCE

Richard Chamberlain (right) in THE THREE MUSKETEERS with Michael York, Oliver Reed and Frank Findlay.

Richard Chamberlain burst into the culture as TV’s dreamy Dr. Kildare, went to the English stage to hone his acting skills and returned to dominate the genre of television miniseries with Centennial, Shogun and The Thornbirds. Chamberlain made his share of movies, and my favorite is his role as Aramis in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers.

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Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor in THE NARROW MARGIN

On April 6, Turner Classic Movies will present The Narrow Margin, a taut 71 minutes of tension from my Overlooked Noir. Growly cop Charles McGraw plays hide-and-seek with a team of hit men on a claustrophobic train. Marie Windsor is unforgettable as the assassins’ target. McGraw and Windsor’s performances are first-rate, and their hardboiled dialogue is terrific. Director Richard Fleisher, early in his career, imaginatively stages the woman-hunt up and down the tight corridors and compartments of the moving train. I just rewatched The Narrow Margin at Noir City in January, and it’s still a masterpiece.