CHAMPAIGN-URBANA, Ill.—The final two days of Ebertfest which ended on Sunday featured some great films in addition to stellar guests who spoke about their craft. Mostly, the invited guests discussed what motivated them to create their art, and the organizers also testified to what drives some of them to program the films they do.

Chaz Ebert kicked off Friday’s

Wednesday evening kicked off the 2022 festival with “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” which recently won the Oscar for best documentary. On Thursday morning, Ebert’s widow Chaz opened the proceedings by introducing the first full day of programming now that the festival has returned to in-person screenings for the first time since 2019. “During the ‘great pause’

Gustavo Dudamel is one of the music world’s most amazing individuals. At just twenty-eight the Venezulan veteran of that country’s El Sistema music program was chosen to become the new artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His welcome concert, ¡Bienvenido Gustavo!, held at the Hollywood Bowl on October 3rd, 2009, set the entire city on fire, with Dudamel’s flying curls and mile-wide smile adorning billboards around town

Graham Moore won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for the 2014 film “The Imitation Game,” his first feature credit. It would take until 2022 for him to have another film in theaters, though Moore insists he has been anything but lazy in the intervening years.

“I did publish two novels between then and now,” Moore said recently during a phone conversation we had together.

It’s film festival season once again, and after two years of darkness, theaters at cinema gatherings are filled with (still-masked) revelers and cinephiles. The Santa Barbara International Film Festival is back on the “American Riviera” in California, and SXSW is right now rocking down in Austin.

While things are back to happening in person, not all is back to “normal.” In addition to masks

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz built an entertainment empire. Against all expectations and rather stiff odds, the married pair not only had the top-rated TV series in “I Love Lucy” to their credit but also Desilu Productions, which produced many of the most popular series of the day, including “Mission Impossible” and Ball’s own “The Lucy Show.” The pair enjoyed great success in Hollywood and no small amount of wealth.

The accusation for more than a half-century is that rock’n’roll is the devil’s music and that such satanic influences will inevitably infect those hapless youths who cheerily gobble up all those records. But what if, “Studio 666” posits, evil forces really were channeling their malicious doings through the minds of famous musicians?

That’s the admittedly half-baked setup for this new horror comedy, which on its face