This year I parachuted into Sundance remotely from the greater NY-NJ metroplex to take the pulse of a festival that kicks off the acquisition year for American film companies scouting for films to bring to theaters and streamers. 40-year old Jesse Eisenberg, who first came to Sundance in 2005 as part of the troubled Berkman...

Audiences have trickled back this year except for the torrent of those lined up to see big deal event films, when the mashup of Barbenheimer dominated the mediascape. Christopher Nolan’s OPPENHEIMER with Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer pulled back the cinema curtain on the Bomb of All Bombs It was actually thrilling to see NY indie...

American Fiction started under the radar at this year’s Toronto Film Festival but emerged as the festival’s People’s Choice award winner. Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison – how’s that for a mashup of references, from the offbeat jazzman to the Invisible Man author? — who gets furloughed from his university Modern American Lit teaching job...

The 37th SXSW Music, Film, Interactive Media festival and trade show Conferences wrapped up this past week in Austin, Tx. That’s after plowing through 110 feature films, including some 75 world premieres, a dozen or more new TV pilots and series episodes, XR—extended reality—experiences, and real film makers come to Texas. SXSW, or South By, which...

There’s an old maxim that you don’t go to the movies to learn history. British director Ridley Scott, who turns 86 this Nov. 30, has had a glorious career making spectacle films, the heir to the big canvas films of David Lean, who made Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai that mined British history to examine...

The New York Film Festival has in recent years expanded since the years I worked there awhile back from 20 or so films to 32 in its Main Slate and nearly 60 films overall. That somewhat corrects a paucity of programming that was reframed at the time as a jewel box selection, a formulation that...

The Polish veteran director Agnieszka Holland’s The Green Border plants itself in a forest where Belarus meets her native Poland, and follows a small cast of disparate people from Afghanistan, Muslim North Africa and Syria used as political footballs in a torturous ground game run back and forth, over, under and through coils of razor wire that...

During the pre-internet days of peace and love of my hippie youth, it seemed like we had reached the end of days: social upheaval, anti-war rebellion, race riots, Richard Nixon’s stealth attacks on the election of 1972 and the constitution, on values, on race, and his perversion of law that collectively manifested in Watergate. There...

After a decades long run at being the dominant fall film launchpad in North America, Toronto or TIFF as it’s known, has been increasingly challenged by a reinvigorated Venice, the world’s oldest film festival – it was started by Benito Mussolini in 1936 – to launch new work around the world and most especially into...

I have checked out not just one Mission Impossible, but two, the latest Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One with Tom Cruise returning as agent Ethan Hunt in the 7th installment in the series, and Oppenheimer, with Cillian Murphy in Christopher Nolan’s large-screen epic about the race to beat Germany to the atomic bomb in WWII.  Tune in here to...