G. Allen Johnson

Ryan Gosling was at SFFilm Awards Night to present an award, not receive one. But the actor stole the show on an evening that honored four film artists, including his “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig and actor Nicolas Cage. At SFFilm’s annual fundraiser at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Monday, Dec. 4, Gosling gave a hilarious introduction of Gerwig, to whom he presented the Irving M. Levin Award for Film Direction. Struggling to describe his admiration for the Sacramento native, however,…

Every movie ticket is a golden ticket to “Wonka,” perhaps the most inviting film of 2023. Crossing Dickensian fable with Mary Poppins whimsy, the origin story of Roald Dahl’s candy man Willy Wonka goes down milk-chocolaty smooth, anchored by a delightful Golden Globe-nominated performance by Timothée Chalamet. Throw in scene-chewing performances from Olivia Colman as an exploitative small-business owner, Keegan-Michael Key as a highly bribable police chief with a sweet tooth, Hugh Grant as an O…

In searching for just the right project with which to make his directorial debut, it’s easy to see what Cord Jefferson saw in Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure.” Its hero is a disgruntled Black novelist named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, whose books are well-reviewed but don’t sell. His agent tells him they’re “not Black enough.” Enraged by the success of another Black writer’s trope-ridden sellout novel, “We Dat Lives in Da Ghetto,” Monk writes his own version of a sellout under an assumed n…

When Michael Mann finally got to direct his first feature film, he’d been toiling away in the film and television business for a decade and a half. Suddenly, it was 1980, he was 37 and directing James Caan in “Thief.” And he was getting a feature film director’s salary, too. “The very first decent paycheck I ever got, I bought two things: a six-cylinder Honda motorcycle and a Ferrari 308,” Mann told the Chronicle. “It’s that conjunction of race technology into a passenger car that drew me to Fer…

Call it the “Dune” loop: Now that the holiday box-office surge is over and everyone has resumed their regular lives, the movie business shifts to awards season and awaits “Dune: Part Two,” targeted to be the next big blockbuster. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t great movies to be seen in theaters. In fact, because of Oscar campaigns and films that were delayed by the actors’ strike, the first three months of 2024 is looking unusually interesting for this time of year. Here are 11 films we’re…

Every Oscar-winning career has a key turning point, and for Jessica Chastain, it came when she landed her first paid job as an actress in the Bay Area. The Sacramento native was cast as Juliet in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” a 1998 TheatreWorks production at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts directed by its founder, Robert Kelley. “Travis Engle was my Romeo, and we set it in modern-day Northern Ireland. Well, not modern-day now, but you know, back then,” Chastain recalled, expla…

After initially saying yes, Apple TV+ said no to what would have been Sofia Coppola’s most massive project, and the Bay Area-raised director has given more details about one of her biggest career disappointments. Coppola, whose latest film is the Priscilla Presley biopic “Priscilla,” revealed to the New Yorker in an interview published Monday, Jan. 22, that Florence Pugh was set to star in an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel “The Custom of the Country,” a project that Apple gave the gree…

With the Israel-Hamas war dividing the political spectrum and sparking protests in cities and on college campuses across the nation, San Francisco International Film Festival audiences responded to “The Teacher,” a movie about Palestinian life in the West Bank under Israeli occupation. Farah Nabulsi’s feature debut won the Audience Award for narrative feature, organizers of the 67th edition of the oldest film festival in the Americas announced Tuesday, April 30. The five-day SFFilm Festival conc…

Mario Van Peebles didn’t have the typical upbringing of his San Francisco schoolmates. When he was young, his father, filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, would take him to Black Panthers meetings in Oakland. There, the actor said, he was taught “the power of imagery,” such as, how the Panthers settled on their iconic black berets. “The Black Panthers, they said the Oakland Police Department are not really here to protect and serve but patrol and control,” Van Peebles, 67, recalled during a virtual pre…

You don’t watch a Jane Schoenbrun film so much as experience it. Two films in, the director of “I Saw the TV Glow” is already a master of mood and alienation, of disconnect and searching, with sometimes disturbing imagery suggestive of David Lynch. No less than the legendary writer and director Paul Schrader — yes, the guy who wrote Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull” and directed the recent masterpieces “First Reformed” and “The Card Counter” — called Schoenbrun in a Facebook post…