Peter Wong

How can claims of so-called “protection of children” be a mask for animus against a highly disliked minority? Gianna Toboni’s documentary “Just Kids” offers an infuriating example. In one scene, South Carolina State House Representative John McCravy introduces in the state legislature’s Health Committee a bill banning gender-affirming care for people under 18, claiming the […]

Frameline turns 50 with drag legends, queer cinema icons, documentaries, horror, retrospectives, and enough beautifully unruly films to make San Francisco proud.

Kai Stanicke’s Teddy Jury Award-winning drama “Trial Of Hein” provides enough specificity to suggest it’s a 19th century-ish tale. Yet the way the story of this year’s winner of Frameline’s Out In The Silence award gets told gives it the timelessness of the Bertolt Brecht classic “Mother Courage And Her Children.”. Like the Thirty […]

Jane Schoenbrum’s “Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma” wonderfully queers up the slasher film, that most violently erotophobic of film genres. The genre’s brutal excesses get ridiculed with oil gusher deaths and clever shots subtracting the fictional film monster’s power. Stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson gamely support Schoenbrum’s entertaining inversion of the slasher […]

A mix of prestige TV, cult cinema, animation, kaiju, and offbeat discoveries

One of the highlights of 1980s and 1990s zine culture was an unusual publication called “The Duplex Planet.” The old people who appeared in the publication contributed original poetry, art, or even their answers to such questions as “Who invented sitting down?” The zine would gain such fans as REM frontman Michael Stipe, cartoonist Dan […]

SFJFF's 46th edition runs July 16–August 2 with 65 films from 17 countries — bar mitzvah dramas, Sea Monkey lawsuits, Gaza field hospitals, and a doc that'll ruin "Dirty Dancing" for you forever.

As the powerful, infuriating, and yet hopeful documentary “Hollywood Does Abortion” shows, American film and television decisionmakers generally round-filed the Spider-Man memo (“With great power comes great responsibility”) when it came to dramatically depicting abortion in mass entertainment. This year’s S.F. Jewish Film Festival Take Action Spotlight film from directors Janet Goldwater, Barbara Attie, and […]

As the powerful, infuriating, and yet hopeful documentary “Hollywood Does Abortion” shows, American film and television decisionmakers generally round-file

“Bipping,” for those unfamiliar with the term, can be described as a “ninja-style car smash and grab.” The perp silently breaks in the window of a car or other vehicle and quickly steals as many valuables as they can grab from the interior.