Seeing “The Favourite” a few days ago, I was so stunned by Olivia Colman’s turn as Queen Anne that I had to go back the next day and see it all over again, checking whether I was right the first time in thinking that this was an extraordinary performance by an extraordinary actress. It was and more. She plays the overweight monarch (fattened by some thirty pounds for the part) stuffing herself with cake and subservient in both

Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez is a filmmaker who’s already got several documentaries and feature films under her belt. In 1998 she launched Astarte Films from San Jose, Costa Rica, a city where she's been working as screenwriter and filmmaker. She was born in Moscow, Russia to an Iraqi father and a Chilean-Costa Rican mother. Her first film, “El Camino,” premiered at the 2008 Berlinale. It would later go on to be shown at

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

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., “I think there’s only one way, forward, for women, and we are 51 percent of the world, so 51 percent of women should do movies,” Austrian director Eva Spreitzhofer (“What Have We Done to Deserve This” a.k.a. “Wo mit haben wir das verdient?”) said at a red carpet event at the last Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) (a still from the film is this article's featured image). With #MeToo and #TimesUp

“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