Silent movies, trans movies, underground movies and a feral Jennifer Lawrence receive top billing this week.
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, one of the Bay Area’s most renowned and fun movie events, presents its 28th edition Wednesday through Sunday. Ticketholders will experience cinema from a century ago, screened with live music in a movie palace setting—the Orinda Theatre in the East Bay, standing in for the temporarily closed Castro Theatre this year. Twenty-two programs of pre-talkie-era gems demonstrate how sophisticated early cinema could be. Every program includes live musical accompaniment; many include recent film restorations. Centerpiece attractions include two classic comedies, both 100 years old and still stellar. Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush,” in which Chaplin’s Little Tramp character goes to the Klondike to strike it rich, is the opening-night attraction. Timothy Brock, conducting the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra, provides musical accompaniment. Buster Keaton’s “Go West,” in which Keaton heads for the frontier and shares the screen with a cow, closes the festival. Music is by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Also on the bill are “Silent Sherlock,” three restorations of Sherlock Holmes tales; “Beau Geste,” which gave rise to an adventure franchise; “Koko!,” from animation pioneers Max and Dave Fleischer; and “Asphalt,” German cinema trailblazer Joe May’s final silent-era work. Directors Carl Dreyer, Tod Browning and Ernst Lubitsch and actors Anna May Wong, Lon Chaney, Gloria Swanson and Tom Mix are other names on the marquee. Tickets are $20-$30 general; $330 for an all-film pass. Visit silentfilm.org.
The San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, created in 1997 to increase the visibility of transgender and gender-variant people onscreen, and to challenge media stereotypes, offers its 2025 edition Thursday through Saturday at the Roxie in San Francisco. Four programs of short films — “Local,” “Music /Animation,” “Documentaries,” and “Transgeneity” — are on the slate. Online viewing is available Nov. 16-23. Visit sftff.org.
The San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival celebrating local independent filmmakers is back as well, with four programs at a new home, San Francisco’s 4-Star Theater, on Saturday, with separate admissions at 5, 7:30 and 10 p.m. Organizers promise an evening of the “weirdest and wildest the Bay has to offer,” with the tone getting darker as the night progresses. For more information, visit mediameltdown.tv.
A woman and a relationship tragicomically unravel in “Die My Love,” a romance and psychothriller that, while low on substance, is exhilarating with a crazy pounding heart. It’s directed by Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay (“Ratcatcher”) and features a feral Jennifer Lawrence. An adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s novel, it starts with the arrival of former New Yorkers Grace (Lawrence), a writer, and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), a musician, at their new Montana home. Initially, they’re nuts for each other. They have sex constantly and dance wildly. They become parents to a baby boy. The relationship frays when Jackson begins regularly disappearing, and Grace, alone with a crying baby and a barky dog, feels ignored, isolated and bored. She becomes unhinged and self-harming, smashing her head into a mirror. Jackson, whose cluelessness almost defies credibility, can’t relate to her. Flashbacks and fantasy sequences provide little insight about Grace, whose mental condition frequently manifests as sexual frustration when more than that is going on. Ramsay, not interested in exploring Grace’s psychosis, has described the movie as foremost a tale of love and madness, and she and Lawrence deliver those smashingly. With her fearless acting, dramatic intuition and natural likability, Lawrence makes Grace a riveting disaster. She’s primal, sympathetic and funny. Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte, as Jackson’s well-meaning parents, and LaKeith Stanfield, as a neighbor Grace desires, provide able support, but the movie is Lawrence’s. “Die My Love” is in Bay Area theaters. Rated R.
“I Wish You All the Best,” the debut feature of filmmaker Tommy Dorfman, is a teen movie with many of the genre’s pleasures, a few of its cliches, but, freshly, with a nonbinary protagonist. Adapted from the novel by Mason Deaver, the North Carolina-set dramedy centers on high-school junior Ben (Corey Fogelmanis), who comes out as nonbinary to their conservative religious parents (Amy Landecker, Judson Mills) and is promptly kicked out of the house. A journey to self-acceptance begins when Ben moves in with older sister Hannah (Alexandra Daddario) and her husband, Thomas (Cole Sprouse), and enrolls in a new school. There, Ben finds a new friend, and crush, in fellow student Nathan (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), and a supportive mentor in an offbeat teacher (a teen-movie staple), Ms. Lyons (a wonderful Lena Dunham). The movie doesn’t dig deeply into Ben’s emotional struggles. At times the tone suggests primetime TV. But Dorfman, a trans woman who grew up in the South, has, by keeping the material real and emphasizing hope over pain, created a sincere and charming movie. “I Wish You All the Best” is at the AMC Kabuki 8 in San Francisco. Rated R.
One of the most uplifting documentaries about death ever, “Come See Me in the Good Light,” directed by Ryan White (“Good Night Oppy”), follows the relationship of Colorado poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley as they celebrate life, poetry and their love for each other following Gibson’s 2021 diagnosis of incurable ovarian cancer. It’s at the Roxie; screening at 7:35 p.m. Nov. 16, 4 and 8:15 p.m. Nov.20 and 12:45 p.m. Nov. 23.
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