An interesting aspect of this time of year is how film festivals fall one after the other. As I was putting Palm Springs coverage to bed, Sundance was immediately up to bat. I wasn’t able to revisit Park City, Utah, this year—heading there in 2020 was one of my last big activities for me prior to lockdowns—but thankfully I was able to connect with several publicists, who had some absolutely stellar films this year to share virtually. I saw several great

In Christopher Murray’s artfully grim “Sorcery,” justice and revenge walk hand in hand for Rosa (newcomer Valentina Véliz Caileo) after her father is murdered by their employer. 

The tragic tale unfolds on the island of Chiloe, off southern Chile. Young Rosa is a servant at the house of Stefan (Sebastian Hulk), head of a German immigrant family. One morning Stefan finds his entire flock of sheep dead in his fields, blaming the Indigenous locals.

The Sundance documentary “Pianoforte” follows some of the world’s best young pianists as they compete at the renowned International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. Among them are Vladimir Ashkenazy, Mitsuko Uchida, Krystian Zimerman and Kevin Kenner. They are teenagers, in that netherworld between youth and adulthood, and finding their way while simultaneously giving expression to their amazing talents.

Razelle Benally and Matthew Galkin’s harrowing “Murder in Big Horn” sounds an alarm, one that has been going off for decades. So many Indigenous women and young girls from the Cheyenne and Crow Nations have vanished from Montana’s Big Horn and surrounding counties; an area that has been dubbed the most dangerous place for Indigenous women in the U.S.

Strictly speaking, Native American reservations are not American soil.  Thus it shouldn’t be surprising that many Indian tribes do not have press freedom codified into their constitutions.  This was the case of the Muscogee Creek nation in Oklahoma, where, in 2018, the tribe’s government repealed free speech protections for the Muscogee Nation News.  That led to a ground-up citizens campaign to restore press freedoms so the Muscogee citizens

Coming of age in a strict religious sect, sinners and saints, right and wrong, impossible expectations, unwanted crushes and dangerous love, this is the imperfect storm hitting seventeen year-old Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen) in writer/director Laurel Parmet’s “The Starling Girl”.

A member of a rigid Kentucky fundamentalist Christian community, Jem has given her soul

Patricia Ortega’s latest film “MAMACRUZ” is a frank and honest film that speaks to the embracing of one’s sexuality, especially late in life.

Spanish actress Kiti Mánver is excellent as Mamacruz, a seamstress, wife, mother, and grandmother, who accidentally clicks on a porn link. Stunned at first, the clip plants the seed of a sexual reawakening within. 

Andrew Durham’s debut feature “Fairyland” is an emotionally-rich character piece with an acute sense of time and place.

Adapted by Durham from Alysia Abbott's book “Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father,” Scoot McNairy is Steve Abbott, a writer and widower who, after the death of his wife, moves with his young daughter Alysia (Emilia Jones) to San Francisco in the seventies.

Erica Tremblay’s “Fancy Dance” aligns its warm heart with the many indigenous women who have been missing and murdered without finding justice and the Indigenous women who must navigate the world where the system casts them as persona non grata.

Written by Tremblay and Miciana Alise, this engrossing film is set on the Seneca Cayuga Reservation in northeast Oklahoma. It is here we find Jax

Early in the new documentary “Little Richard: I Am Everything,” two sentences perfectly capture the man and his legacy.

John Waters proclaims, “He spit on every rule there was in music.” and Little Richard himself declares, “My music broke down the walls of segregation.”

When we think of the “kings” of Rock & Roll, Elvis is always crowned