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The 53rd San Francisco Film Festival will begin April 22nd and the film Julia will be in attendance. To show May 1st at 5:30, Julia is a film about a sleazy, vile protagonist who kidnaps a young boy for some quick cash (Sfiff). This lonely booze-hound double-crosses another kidnapper and soon Julia's life spirals ever downward. An action-packed thriller Julia is not to be missed along with several other noteworthy cinema treasures. All the details on the San Francisco Film Festival and Julia can be found below.

The synopsis for Julia here:

"Julia is a drunk. She loses her job in real estate and at an A.A. meeting meets a neighbor, Elena, an addled Mexican woman who talks about having lots of money and a plan to kidnap her own son from the boy's grandfather, a wealthy businessman. Elena wants Julia's help. Julia says yes with her own plan to do this alone.

Writers: Roger Bohbot and Michael Collins

Director: Erick Zonca

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Saul Rubinek, Kate del Castillo, Aidan Gould

Studio: Magnolia Pictures

Rating: 7.5/10

In the world of bad decisions, I wonder what the percentage is between those that are just plain bad and those that are made because you’re broke, desperate, or drunk (or all three) and the decision seems wise given your state of mind. I mean yeah, we all just plain screw up or make a bad call or pursue an idea that’s just flat out wrong, but the human ability to fuck up big-time quadruples when you’re broke, drunk, and/or desperate. You’ve got nothing to lose so you just let it fly and before you know it, you’re in deeper dutch than you were in before. Such is one of the many premises embedded in one of the best “lost gem...

• The Tribeca Film Festival have announced their World Narrative and World Documentary Feature Film Competition line-ups and the films named for its Spotlight category today and the better programming, better category labeling, familiar directors and a slight decrease in volume makes the 6th edition perhaps the young fest’s strongest edition yet.Here is a quick copy and paste of all the three sections and individual briefing on each film.:… World Narrative Feature CompetitionBorn and Bred (Nacido y Criado), directed by Pablo Trapero, written by Pablo Trapero and Mario Rulloni. (Argentina) – U.S. Premiere. When his life is shattered by a terrifying accident, a successful interior designer winds up in the desolate extremes of Patagonia, trying to find himself among other lost, disaffected men. Pablo Trapero's haunting film demonstrates why he is at the cutting edge of Argentina's most exciting cinema.Gardener of Eden, directed by Kevin Connolly,

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PARIS -- Pascale Ferran's "Lady Chatterley" is the sixth screen adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's scabrous (for its time) tale of an aristocrat's adulterous passion for her husband's gamekeeper, and the second French version. (For the record, the other four are English, Japanese, Italian and a Franco-German pornographic film). It also is the first by a female director.

It would be pleasing to report that Ferran's focus on the woman's point of view, signaled by the dropping of the third word in Lawrence's original title, "Lady Chatterley's Lover," has added a new dimension. Unfortunately, it has not. Lawrence was sufficiently attuned to feminist currents when he wrote the book in 1928 to provide the focus himself. Here Ferran's overliteral visual interpretation -- polished, tasteful but ultimately bloodless -- fails to convey any of the resonance of the text.

At 21⁄2 hours, it also is far too long. While French critics have praised the movie highly, it is unlikely to win a following outside its home territory, the festival circuit and the circle of those for whom the name Lady Chatterley is an irresistible attraction.

Constance Chatterley (Marina Hands), a young married woman bored by life with her paralyzed upper-class husband Clifford (Hippolyte Girardot), finds romance and release with gamekeeper Oliver Mellors (whom Ferran chooses for no apparent reason to rename Parkin, played by Jean-Louis Coulloc'h). She longs for a child and, partly with Clifford's tacit consent, becomes pregnant by Parkins While Constance is away on holiday with her sister Hilda (Helene Fillieres) in the south of France, Parkin's estranged wife returns. The couple then plan to divorce their respective spouses and make a new life together.

One of the film's major problems is the casting. Hands is watchable, playing Constance as a conscientious but childlike wife whose urgent need for sexual fulfillment leads her to break her marriage vows. But the uncharismatic Coulloc'h fails utterly to convince as Parkin.

The book's transgressive charge had to do with class as much as with sex. Coulloc'h's white collar and tie-wearing Parkin comes over more as an out-of-work bank manager roughing it for a while between jobs than as a man in touch with nature and its urgings. In the book, Mellors' earthiness is conveyed partly by the use of dialect, not to mention the infamous four-letter word. An actor with a regional accent might have been more appropriate in the role. Instead, the chasm in class between Constance and Parkin is blurred, and the sight of them frolicking naked in the rain like a couple of secondary-residence owners enjoying a weekend in the country is likely to inspire as much mirth as wonder.

Finally, it is the crippled Clifford, fighting the pangs of jealousy as he submits to his wife's determination to look to another man as a means of conceiving a child, who inspires the greatest sympathy.

LADY CHATTERLEY

Maia Films, Arte France

Credits:

Director: Pascale Ferran

Screenwriters: Roger Bohbot, Pascale Ferran, Pierre Trividic

Based on the novel by: D.H. Lawrence

Producers: Olivier Guerbois, Gilles Sandoz

Director of photography: Julien Hirsch

Music: Beatrice Thiriet

Costume designer: Marie-Claude Altot

Editors: Mathilde Muyard, Yann Dedet

Cast:

Constance Chatterley: Marina Hands

Parkin: Jean-Louis Coulloc'h

Sir Clifford: Hippolyte Girardot

Mrs. Bolton: Helene Alexandridis

Hilda: Helene Fillieres

Running time -- 158 minutes

No MPAA rating...