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

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

In director Mary Nighy’s “Alice, Darling,” the toll an abusive relationship takes on the victim is explored through a subtly observed screenplay and Ana Kendrick’s surprising dramatic force.

Kendrick is a revelation as Alice, a woman who exists as an actor in her own life, her true self trapped deep within the confines of a controlling boyfriend, Simon (Charlie Carrick). 

As Alice walks through every waking

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

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