Park City, Ut. | Steve James loves Chicago. The city helped to ensure his place in the pantheon of great documentarians thanks to “Hoop Dreams,” widely considered one of the greatest non-fiction films ever made. But in the twenty-five years since that documentary about inner-city high school basketball, the Windy City has continued to give James opportunities to tell its stories. There was “America to Me,” a look at some of the city’s

Santa Barbara International Film Festival is up against Sundance this year, so the demands for top independent films are especially heightened this season, as are the demands on stars like Brad Pitt (bestowed an honor in California) to choose one or the other.

As always, there are unexpected gems, including a rather offbeat comedy from South America I was able to see (review below)

In the last decade twin sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska have doggedly pursued film ventures in the horror genre. Armed with ingenuity, a DYI ethos and a pledge to frighten honest, hard-working people, the Soskas have acted in, directed, screenwritten and produced movies that would give Lloyd Kaufman and Eli Roth a run for their money.

The Soskas have directed such films as “Dead Hooker

“Church & State” examines the remarkable true story of an inexperienced gay activist who, in partnership with a Salt Lake City law firm and members of the local LGBTQ community, successfully ended Utah's ban on gay marriage.

Mark Lawrence, a middle-aged gay man, led the charge for gay marriage equality in Utah. He’s a bit of an acquired taste (he’s so off-putting to some that it made him

Sam Mendes’s name for his film is right. It hits you in the face with the mud, blood and gloom that was there, heavily, relentlessly, during that terrible year following three years of horror and followed by an even worse one. Out of this war that Mendes described as “a chaos of mismanagement and tragedy,” he has made a war movie like none other. Eschewing regular scripts for war films, the storyline is about how to stop a battle

Sky Bergman is a filmmaker and teacher based in San Luis Obispo, California, a university town known for being the home of Cal Poly (California Polytechnic State University). In 2017 Bergman brought her documentary “Lives Well Lived,” which shared the wisdom of a group of gloriously happy senior citizens, to the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. It’s a wonderful film—which I hasten to even describe as “little”—that sheds light

2019 started out as a bumpy road. By summer I worried that I wouldn’t be able to make a full top ten. By year’s end, however, some fine work started to shine.

1. (an absolute tie of the two most original and cinematically pleasing films of the year!): “The Irishman” (directed by Martin Scorsese) / “Once Upon a Time In Hollywood” (directed by Quentin Tarantino). Both films

The circle is now complete. Forty-two years after George Lucas forever changed Hollywood (and the lives of moviegoers around the world!) with the original “Star Wars,” director J.J. Abrams brings it all home with “Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker.”

I was there opening weekend in 1977. When the music blared and the opening crawl began to roll, I knew I was in for

This Israeli film by Sameh Zoabi, an Arab Israeli, comes to us boasting a number of awards but that doesn’t prepare us for the treat of this thoroughly enjoyable and unpretentious story. “Tel Aviv on Fire” is one of those gems––think “The Band’s Visit” or “Tony Erdmann”––that grab and delight from the opening scene to the very end, with nary a slackening of rhythm. Salam (Kais Nashif, a well-known Palestinian actor) works

All week our film critics weigh in on a year that (almost) was by naming their favorite films. The filmmaker Michael Apted has been checking in on a group of British folks every seven years since they were children of seven, with the initial mission being to discover both A) if Great Britain still had a class system; and B) if the aphorism “give me a child and I’ll show you the man” still holds true. Those fresh-faced English youths