Elizabeth Blake-Thomas’s “Hunt Club” (written by David Lipper and John Saunders) is an exploitation flick with a strong message of female empowerment and the type of picture that was a dime a dozen back in the grindhouse era of the seventies. 

Films like these would feature a band of women (usually trapped in a prison or held by slave traffickers) who are tortured during

“John Wick: Chapter 4” opens with a series of bloody punches and then uses a direct homage to David Lean’s 1962 classic “Lawrence of Arabia” to take the audience into the wild world of the most resilient assassin ever to grace the screen.

Chad Stahelski’s original “John Wick” was wire-tight in its tale of a lone killer seeking revenge. The filmmaker used its violent

The sins of the father weigh heavily in Ben Young’s “Devil’s Peak," a new film that wants to be a modern “At Close Range" but doesn’t have the depth to carry its screenplay to the finish line.

Hopper Penn (son of Robin Wright and Sean Penn) is Jacob McNeely a young man living in Jackson County, NC who is cursed to bear his family name.

Sylvester Stallone had a say in crafting Rocky Balboa’s character arc in the first “Creed” and co-wrote the screenplay for the sequel. Now comes “Creed III” to finish out the trilogy, and Stallone, both on screen and on the page, is missed sorely.

Michael B. Jordan understandably chose this picture for his directorial debut. While the film is worthwhile, generally, Jordan’s directorial

The drive-in theater, the sound was never great and the picture not the sharpest, airplane noise, roaring trains, right in the middle of a big scene, rain or thick fog. As April Wright’s wonderful documentary “Back to the Drive-In” reminds us, for those who remember their heyday, none of that mattered.

Wright’s film is sweet, sad, and informative, getting to the heart of what makes the

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

Small and unexpected things can sometimes change your entire world.

Mordecai (Judd Hirsch) likes to fix things, but his phone is from twenty years ago and is held together with duct tape and tin foil. He’s worked his entire life as a plumber and a painter. But this is a story about the things he cannot fix, like getting older, the Alzheimer’s diagnosis of his wife Fela (Carol Kane), and his relationship