"BAD AXE" Director: David Siev

David Siev set out to make a documentary about his hometown of Bad Axe, Michigan, but what he wound up chronicling was how the covid pandemic affected his family’s small business. The pandemic saw Siev move back home to his small town from New York, where he and his mixed Asian-Mexican-American

When Brock Turner was handed down a sentence of just six months in prison for a sexual assault case that occurred on the Stanford University campus in 2015, a collective outrage at the light sentence eventually led to a successful recall campaign against the judge who decided the case, Aaron Persky.  Many activists, especially those who decried a wealthy white man such as Turner punished so lightly, cheered—at least, at first.  The fallout from

When Kevin Abrams started work on his documentary “I Got a Monster” in 2018, he was determined that retelling the story of Baltimore’s corrupt Gun Trace Task Force not traffic in “ruin porn,” a staple of the HBO series “The Wire.”

“It’s nicknamed Charm City, and I really got why,” Abrams, a New Jersey native, said from his home in Los Angeles.  “As an East Coast

Willem Dafoe is no stranger to unhinged performances. Perhaps that’s why he plays both creepy and villainous so damn well. But what if a filmmaker were to take that extraordinary talent and energy, and force the Oscar-nominated actor to act alone, essentially portraying a character who is penned up?

That’s the starting point for “Inside,” which sees Dafoe’s art thief Nemo become trapped

Cheech Marin loves sports, both in movies and real life. In 1996 he paired up with Kevin Costner for the golf romp “Tin Cup,” and in the weeks to come he will be seen in “The Long Game,” a real-life tale about a young Chicano golf team in Del Rio, Texas, in the fifties.

Meantime, Marin is co-starring with Woody Harrelson in “Champions,” a touching basketball comedy in which

Festival season is in full swing, with some astonishing films that are sure to either be seen in a theaters or on a streaming platform soon. Here are six films from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2023 that you'll want to keep on your radar this spring:

"26.2 TO LIFE" Director: Christine Yoo: Amid the ongoing conversation about prison reform

Ceiling fans, a dame of dubious motivations, drugs, sex, the sinister side of Hollywood, top hats and tommy guns, high stops from above ceiling fans, they’re all here in “Marlowe,” the new noir thriller from filmmaker Neil Jordan (“The Crying Game,” “The End of the Affair”), with Liam Neeson as the dependable yet perennially down-on-his-luck private eye Philip Marlowe. “Marlowe” finds Raymond Chandler’s