Like all current cinema events, the 2020 iteration of the Bentonville Film Festival is taking place almost exclusively online. Next week, the festival started by Oscar-winner Geena Davis will take place in Northwest Arkansas as pure usual, but with on-the-ground screenings taking place at a local drive-in—with nearly everything else going virtual. Panel discussions, celebrity guests and a great number of films will be part of this year’s festival, and its

It’s a strange time for all of us, and perhaps it’s little wonder that the crop of films being released direct to streaming has itself gotten weird. How else to explain a movie where Mick Jagger plays an arts dealer who may, and this is giving nothing away, actually be the devil in disguise? (in case you don’t guess his name, it is Joseph Cassidy. As Al Pacino observed as Satan in “The Devil’s Advocate, “I have so many names.”).

The documentary is called “The Fight,” which could not be a more à propos title for a film about the ACLU’s ongoing quest to defend not only civil rights, but also the necessity for everyone to enjoy free speech, no matter how odious their views might be.

But the civil rights organization’s mandate became even more demanding during the Trump administration, as the president and his cabinet have sought to make

It’s inarguable that the pioneering work of Marie and Pierre Curie changed the world, for both good and ill. “Radioactive,” the new film starring Rosamund Pike and Sam Riley as the late-nineteenth century Parisians, gives us a brief on the life, and, yes, the deaths, largely due to radiation poisoning, of the couple that is part love story, part scientific procedural and, somewhat strangely, decides to also jump through time (more on this later).

With the multiplexes shuttered, and the so-called event films on hold for months yet, it’s a boomtime for documentaries, which continue their march onto streaming platforms. Here are a few choice non-fiction flicks to keep an eye out for.

“Desert One”

It’s been four decades since Iranian students overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, beginning a hostage situation that would only end

It’s rare that a documentary will film for a decade, but that’s precisely what New York Times reporters Catrin Einhorn and Leslye Davis accomplished with their new film “Father Soldier Son.”

The documentary, which premieres Friday on Netflix, follows two generations of upstate New York’s Eisch family. The father, Master Sgt. Brian Eisch, is a veteran of the Afghanistan

Could there possibly be a more apt time for a documentary about John Lewis, the civil rights pioneer and longtime Georgia congressman? In this singular moment of protest and cultural shift, documentarian Dawn Porter is hoping that her new film “John Lewis: Good Trouble” will be a part of the conversation.

“Despite some evidence to the contrary, I count myself as an optimistic person. Between the pandemic and all this violence