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Festival season is in full swing, with some astonishing films that are sure to either be seen in a theaters or on a streaming platform soon. Here are six films from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2023 that you'll want to keep on your radar this spring:

"26.2 TO LIFE" Director: Christine Yoo: Amid the ongoing conversation about prison reform

Small and unexpected things can sometimes change your entire world.

Mordecai (Judd Hirsch) likes to fix things, but his phone is from twenty years ago and is held together with duct tape and tin foil. He’s worked his entire life as a plumber and a painter. But this is a story about the things he cannot fix, like getting older, the Alzheimer’s diagnosis of his wife Fela (Carol Kane), and his relationship

Ceiling fans, a dame of dubious motivations, drugs, sex, the sinister side of Hollywood, top hats and tommy guns, high stops from above ceiling fans, they’re all here in “Marlowe,” the new noir thriller from filmmaker Neil Jordan (“The Crying Game,” “The End of the Affair”), with Liam Neeson as the dependable yet perennially down-on-his-luck private eye Philip Marlowe. “Marlowe” finds Raymond Chandler’s

In director Mary Nighy’s “Alice, Darling,” the toll an abusive relationship takes on the victim is explored through a subtly observed screenplay and Ana Kendrick’s surprising dramatic force.

Kendrick is a revelation as Alice, a woman who exists as an actor in her own life, her true self trapped deep within the confines of a controlling boyfriend, Simon (Charlie Carrick). 

As Alice walks through every waking

If anything filmmaker Zach Heinzerling hopes that as people watch his new docuseries “Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence,” they try to keep in mind that it’s easy, from the outside, to say “this could never be me.” Indeed, the filmmaker wishes viewers appreciate the power that a malevolent narcissist such as Larry Ray can have on young people who are trying to find their identity at such an impressionable age.

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.