Arriving early, anywhere, is winning. Sort of. On Monday my train, the first one out of Paris that morning, was held for four hours in Saint-Raphael, about fifteen miles outside of Cannes, after an electrical outage wreaked havoc at the Cannes Gare. Four hours later, the train started moving and we were in Cannes within moments. The same fate was awaiting those of my colleagues who decided to take a later train out of the French capital,

CHAMPAIGN-URBANA, Ill.—The final two days of Ebertfest which ended on Sunday featured some great films in addition to stellar guests who spoke about their craft. Mostly, the invited guests discussed what motivated them to create their art, and the organizers also testified to what drives some of them to program the films they do.

Chaz Ebert kicked off Friday’s

Wednesday evening kicked off the 2022 festival with “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” which recently won the Oscar for best documentary. On Thursday morning, Ebert’s widow Chaz opened the proceedings by introducing the first full day of programming now that the festival has returned to in-person screenings for the first time since 2019. “During the ‘great pause’

Graham Moore won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for the 2014 film “The Imitation Game,” his first feature credit. It would take until 2022 for him to have another film in theaters, though Moore insists he has been anything but lazy in the intervening years.

“I did publish two novels between then and now,” Moore said recently during a phone conversation we had together.

The manifold themes of “Northern Skies over Empty Space”—there’s revenge, the upending of gender roles, heroism, searching for water in a barren land, a patriarchy on the wane, a natural habitat that is threatening—are something to behold, yet filmmaker Alejandra Marquez Abella has directed an evocative and everchanging film, which opened at Berlinale over the weekend, that draws on multiple narrative threads convincingly.

If 2021 was a year of major documentaries, then 2022 is already shaping up to be even better for reality-based filmmaking. Sundance and Slamdance both had amazing documentaries to offer last month, but here are two other great documentaries to seek out post-haste.

“The Conductor” Director: Bernadette Wegenstein

Oh, how optimistic we all were this time a year ago, when Sundance went online—as we hoped, just that one time. Twelve months later, and omicron continues to run around ruining pretty much everything. Thus it forced Sundance online once again this year, and I had to enjoy whatever films I could from the comfort of my home rather than the chill and elevation of Park City.