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

If anything filmmaker Zach Heinzerling hopes that as people watch his new docuseries “Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence,” they try to keep in mind that it’s easy, from the outside, to say “this could never be me.” Indeed, the filmmaker wishes viewers appreciate the power that a malevolent narcissist such as Larry Ray can have on young people who are trying to find their identity at such an impressionable age.

An interesting aspect of this time of year is how film festivals fall one after the other. As I was putting Palm Springs coverage to bed, Sundance was immediately up to bat. I wasn’t able to revisit Park City, Utah, this year—heading there in 2020 was one of my last big activities for me prior to lockdowns—but thankfully I was able to connect with several publicists, who had some absolutely stellar films this year to share virtually. I saw several great

The Sundance documentary “Pianoforte” follows some of the world’s best young pianists as they compete at the renowned International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. Among them are Vladimir Ashkenazy, Mitsuko Uchida, Krystian Zimerman and Kevin Kenner. They are teenagers, in that netherworld between youth and adulthood, and finding their way while simultaneously giving expression to their amazing talents.

Strictly speaking, Native American reservations are not American soil.  Thus it shouldn’t be surprising that many Indian tribes do not have press freedom codified into their constitutions.  This was the case of the Muscogee Creek nation in Oklahoma, where, in 2018, the tribe’s government repealed free speech protections for the Muscogee Nation News.  That led to a ground-up citizens campaign to restore press freedoms so the Muscogee citizens