It’s hard to think of another point in time when LGBTIQQ youth have been so visible across media, for better and for worse. Thousands of young male and female fans watch Kurt Hummel, the openly gay teen on Glee played by Chris Colfer, even as elsewhere on the hit show’s network, conservative pundits try to downplay the problem of anti-queer bullying and rail against the evils of same-sex marriage. And of course, there is the It Gets Better Project, an unprecedented outpouring of direct address aimed at queer youth that has outgrown YouTube and to some degree–with each successive PSA from a politician, sports team, celebrity and corporation—its original target audience.

So, when I wrote last year that Frameline34, “truly belongs to the young,” my estimation might have been premature. It is especially fitting then that at this year’s San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival three of the showcase features—Spork, Mangus! and Tomboy, along with opening night selection Gun Hill Road all centered around the lives of young folk. Each of these films eschews the more egregious clichés that have glommed on to that perennial favorite of LGBT film festivals, the coming of age narrative, by shifting the drama from coming out to the more complicated art of getting by.

In his scathing review of Robert Siodmak’s 1944 film Phantom Lady, critic Bosley Crowther rattles off what is essentially a laundry list of stylistic hallmarks of the not-yet named genre that Siodmak would later be recognized as a master of: film noir. “[Phantom Lady] is full of the play of light and shadow, of macabre atmosphere, of sharply realistic faces and dramatic injections of sound,” Crowther writes. “People sit around in gloomy places looking blankly and silently into space, music blares forth from empty darkness, and odd characters turn up and disappear.” He ends his dressing-down by taking Siodmak and producer Joan Harrison (a former screenwriter for Hitchcock) to task for overlooking “one basic thing” in their efforts to get the film’s look right: “a plausible, realistic plot.”

History has proven Crowther wrong; or rather, it has proven that he got everything but the part about plot right. Fans haven’t kept returning to film noir’s “macabre atmosphere[s],” its “sharply realistic faces” in “gloomy places looking blankly and silently into space,” and its “play of light and shadow” to simply find out whodunit each time. In noir, style can be substantive with the storyline often but a means to those ends. Just look at Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), whose wildly careening plot and stylistic excessiveness puts it about as far from plausible and realistic as you can get, and yet it has been hailed as the sine qua non of the genre for those very reasons.

“You’ve gotta have a gimmick,” goes the line from Gypsy, and a list of some of the subjects featured in the 9th annual San Francisco Documentary Film Festival reads like the first round of cuts from an America’s Got Talent audition. There is a sex shaman who testifies to the powers of his libidinal healing workshops (Sex Magic), a rapping cowboy from North Dakota (Roll Out, Cowboy), a mystic who stares into the sun (Eat the Sun), an Oklahoman environmental activist and bike advocate (Biker Fox), and the dueling farmers determined to grow the world’s largest pumpkin (Giants).

Gasper Noé’s Enter the Void is destined to join the ranks of Pink Floyd’s the Wall, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Trainspotting as a go-to visual aid for casual substance users in dorm rooms across the globe. Perhaps it will prompt those same buzzed, perhaps straight and probably male viewers to muse on what happens to us after we die, or whether or not something akin to that great unknown can be experienced while under the influence, or if one can ever truly approximate either tripping or dying, or both, on film.

With a near 50-feature filmography filled with its share of double-crossed gunslingers, wronged toughs, and shattered loyalties, director Johnnie To knows a thing or two about vengeance. To’s latest bullet-riddled ballet follows a familiar trajectory for the Hong Kong filmmaker and his frequent collaborator Wai Ka Fai (who wrote the screenplay; Vengeance, which played the San Francisco International Film Festival 2010 and returns to the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki, is an elegant and masterful treatise on its titular subject that holds up to such previous triumphs as Exiled (2006) and The Mission (1999).

In Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks, the President of the United States, in a final bid to save the human race, implores the space invaders before him with the exhortation: “Little people, can’t we all just get along?” Needless to say, he doesn’t live. A cursory scan of the battle-poised titles at this year’s Another Hole in the Film Festival similarly answers “Hell nah” to any notions of smiling on your fellow brother, be they alien, lycanthrope or simply psychotic. There’s Alien vs. Ninja, Dr. “S” Battles the Sex Crazed Reefer Zombies, Jimmy Tupper vs. The Goatman of Bowie, Mil Mascaras vs. The Aztec Mummy, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl and, last but not least, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. And that’s not even counting the other films in SF Indiefest’s 7th annual showcase of the wildest and weirdest in independently produced sci-fi, horror and fantasy that include their share of supernatural showdowns and savage fights to the death.

By and large, the consensus among the movie-goers, fellow film critics, and critically minded queer pals I’ve informally polled seems to be that Frameline34  has offered some of the festival’s strongest programming in recent memory (full disclosure: I was on this year’s shorts screening committee and contributed program notes to the festival’s publications). Chalk it up to the fact that there are far fewer fluffy coming-out narratives or romcoms this year; or to the bumper crop of Showcase features by established and emerging international directors; or to the large portion of documentaries that speak relevantly to hot-button issues—military service, same sex marriage, body image—currently contested within the LGBT community, as well as those that retrace queer history. It’s as if Frameline’s audience threw down the challenge: “Show us something different.” The festival has largely obliged.

Senator John McCain may have been testing the limits of hyperbole when he claimed in the presidential debates that gazing into Vladimir Putin’s eyes he saw a “K,” a “G” and a “B,” but Russia’s unforeseen and boorish display of military grandstanding in Georgia gave cause for both candidates to make “curbing Russian aggression” a serious part of their foreign policy discussions. A different sort of Russian aggression is at work in Cargo 200, Alexei Balabanov’s latest nasty piece of work. […]

Whether out of boredom on a long weekend, or for a school assignment, or out of a burning sense of ambition seeded by repeated viewings of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (or Harold and Maude), chances are that at some point in your young adult past, you picked up a camera. Someone became a filmmaker, if only for the span of an afternoon. My own efforts included a shriek-filled “remake” of Child’s Play — but with a little girl doll called “Dolly Dearest,” which entailed liberal amounts of ketchup and a screenplay for an extremely low-tech knockoff of The Birds called The Boxes.

My first and last attempts as a filmmaker, however, are nothing like the final products of the talented young directors in TILT’s Summer Film Camp showcase (screening as part of of Straight Outta Film Arts program at YBCA).That may be because these filmmakers receive training: TILT, which stands for Teaching Intermedia Literacy Tools and is overseen by the local media arts nonprofit Film Arts Foundation, aims to help young people develop their abilities to critically evaluate the media around them and to teach them the skills necessary to create their own media. […]

It’s not too surprising that On the Lot, the Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg-produced reality show in which budding filmmakers submit weekly short films in competition for a pitiable $1 million production deal with Dreamworks, hasn’t completely caught fire. It might be the lack of shallow Machiavellian scheming and casual nudity within a hot house environment a la Survivor or Big Brother, or, maybe, the dearth of withering judgments (“On the Lot” has no Simon Cowell amongst its trio of judges, and Carrie Fisher is this close to becoming the Paula Abdul softie); or the fact that thanks to 24-hour-paparazzi-surveillance and the collapse of studio-run P.R., Hollywood has lost much of its mystique. Still, the show has its strong points — Oakland-based contestant Mateen Kemet, being one of them. Now that only seven contestants remain, perhaps the presence of a Bay Area rep will boost local ratings. Kemet, though, is worth tailing for other reasons. […]