Premiering in the U.S. Dramatic competition slate at Sundance, Krystin Ver Linden’s “Alice” is a film where fiction meets reality, as one woman straddles two different generations.

Keke Palmer is Alice, a slave on a tucked-away Georgia plantation run by Old Testament-thumping Paul Bennet (Jonny Lee Miller). Alice secretly marries Joseph (Sinqua Walls) and tries to take solace in as much wedded

The first three days of 2022 Sundance have yielded a good crop of films in the competition slate. 

Over the weekend two genre films were shown, each one making their mark with inventive individuality.

Writer/director Andrew Semans’ “Resurrection” is an unnerving thriller starring Rebecca Hall as Margaret, a single mother and

“We live and die by the stories we tell each other,” is the line that begins writer/director Jonathan Nossiter’s latest piece, the exquisite “Last Words.”

Adapted from a novel by Santiago Amigorena (he also co-wrote the screenplay), Nossiter’s film follows Kal (newcomer Kalipha Touray), the last human on the face of the Earth. The year is 2085. One year earlier he was

The Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s film “There Is No Evil” (Golden Bear Award, Berlin Festival, 2021) is extraordinary on a number of levels—political daring in a country where dissent or criticism is harshly punished, as well as narrative. Four chapters or stories, unrelated, maintain throughout a profound tension, not with special effects or major reveals but by dint of taking us deep into what a brutal regime does to its people and how these

“tick tick… BOOM!” is the name of the musical Jonathan Larson wrote and performed about the failure of “Superbia,” his rock-opera adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 that was to be his ticket to Broadway. Sadly, this didn’t happen. If something good came out of that piece’s failure, it would be the powerfully personal follow up that would lead to the legendary Broadway groundbreaker “Rent.”

Throughout the centuries philosophers have responded to the idea of death in many ways. Kierkegaard saw grief as a door to faith while Heidegger found it a way to give deeper meaning to one’s life. It was Camus who found the absurdity in it all.

As adults, grief exists as an emotional conglomerate and people from all walks of life deal with it in different manners.

“Satanic Panic” is a very real fear that gripped the United States in the eighties and nineties.

Over those decades, there existed over 10,000 unsubstantiated cases of Satanic ritual abuse and death. By the late nineties the panic began to spread to other countries. The media and the church unleashed a terror campaign. Though not as large an issue as it once was, the fear persists to this day.