SANTA BARBARA, Calif. | The 34th annual Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) ended over a week ago but organizers of this fete of movies, celebrities and all things cinema have already announced the 2020 iteration will be bumped up a bit next year to Jan. 15-25, which may put it in direct competition with other festivals like Sundance. No matter, as the 2019 version closed out with awards galore and more amazing works

Talk about coincidence. Or premonition. A few days ago, getting ready for a trip to Lisbon, I remembered the great Alain Tanner film “In the White City” (“Dans la ville blanche” in the French original; 1983) and watched it on You Tube. Bruno Ganz was fabulous as always, as the AWOL ship mechanic, not easy as he spends the entire time going up and down steps in the Alfama or mailing letters and only occasionally interacting with other people. I don’t think I’d had one conscious thought

“Roma,” a Netflix production, triumphed on Sunday at the British film awards (BAFTA) by earning the Best Film and, for Alfonso Cuaron, in the director’s chair, the Best Director awards, further cementing Netflix’s unmistakably-strong place in the filmed entertainment industry. Although several Netflix series have won awards, in recent years, Netflix has never known so resounding a victory as what took place last night

Finney, one of the greatest, is gone but images from his tremendous cinema resume come flooding our memory. The role in Arthur in “Saturday night and Sunday morning” (1960) of course, his heavy working- class features immediately making cinema history, and from then on and on, in an extraordinary variety of parts. My favorite, of course, remains Sir in “The Dresser” (1983) alongside long-suffering Tom Courtenay, another great

(SANTA BARBARA, Calif.) Santa Barbara, often referred to as the “American Riviera,” is hosting its 34th film festival this week, replete with the typical red-carpet events and world premieres of films from around the globe. Yes, Melissa McCarthy, Spike Lee, Claire Foy and other high-wattage stars have been seen here this week, but in addition to appearances by those A-listers, numerous filmmakers and stars on the rise have also been

SpectreVision, the genre division of Company X and ACE Pictures, […]

Smithsonian Channel will air the documentary “Laws of the Lizard” […]

The Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman has died at 87 this […]

The no-frills “The Guilty” (“Den Skyldige” in the original Danish) is Denmark’s gathering storm movie. This film was selected as that country’s entry for the Foreign Language Film category at the Academy Awards. In “Guilty” police officer Asger Holm answers an emergency call from a woman who’s been kidnapped. As the details of the crime emerge, becoming increasingly complex, Holm, a voice on the phone

For a while everyone thought that that the adventures of Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law in “Sherlock Holmes and John Watson” were going to remain without a sequel, ever since the release of the second opus, “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.” Box office receipts were slightly higher than those of the previous film (545M v. 524), the third in the franchise was announced very hastily, and then, nothing happened