Park City, Ut. - To even describe it seems ludicrous: recruit two young women, who think they will be part of a hidden-camera prank show, to inadvertently assassinate Kim Jong-nam, the dissident half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

In an airport. In broad daylight. With hundreds of witnesses and cameras recording it all.

This isn’t the plot for a spy thriller, but rather the

PARK CITY, Ut. - Documentaries need not be lengthy to explore a fascinating subject, as I learned at the “Documentary Shorts Program 2” at Sundance. In “All That Perishes at the Edge of Land,” filmmaker Hira Nabi’s camera magnificently captures the “ship breaking” industry of Pakistan, which employs the poorest of the poor to disassemble obsolete carrier vessels for scrap. The ships grounded ashore in the region

Park City, Ut. | Filmmaker Bao Nguyen didn’t mince words when we sat down in a house not far from where his documentary about Bruce Lee, called “Be Water,” premiered at Sundance this week.

Nguyen idolized Lee as a young man because there were rather few Asian and Asian-American actors on U.S. television and in movies in those days. When Lee was trying to get his start in Hollywood, World War II was only a few

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

PARK CITY, Ut. | (Film critic Eric Althoff is in Park City covering Sundance 2020 for Screen Comment) Matt Yoka found a rather unusual Los Angeles treasure trove in an unassuming storage unit. There, in multiple boxes, sat some 3,200 ¾ inch Betamax tapes of helicopter news footage, all of it captured in the nineties by a now-defunct aerial news firm called Los Angeles News Service.

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)

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