Despite our most fervent hopes, 2021 was the second strange year for both cinema and the world. Festivals were either online or continued a hybrid format (Slamdance just announced that due to omicron, they will be online only in January), and that communal feeling we have missed being in theaters together has only partially returned. All this to say it was a most unusual twelve months—again.

Jon Alpert had been working on his documentary for so long, he had to transfer footage from videotape. Using a digital process known as “TerraNexing,” Alpert’s eighties and nineties footage was renewed on the 16:9 aspect ratio.

What couldn’t be sanitized was the horror of the nation’s drug epidemic, which Alpert shows us in microcosm in “Life of Crime

Charles Chaplin was born in a tough area of London and came to America not only to reinvent himself but partially to invent the language of the then-new art of cinema itself. Through pluck, luck and sheer determination, Chaplin became a leading man and director—often playing the familiar “Little Tramp” character for decades, first in silent films and then, most famously, with a rousing closing speech in “The Great Dictator.”

PARIS - On Thursday it was announced that Canal Plus, a France-based media conglomerate that began in 1984 as this country’s first privately-owned television, would be definitively pulling out of the Cannes Festival as its main sponsors. Cannes, and Canal as it’s known more simply, have been in a collab for the last 28 years, the latter beaming the opening and closing ceremonies into hundreds of thousands of homes, its familiar logo omnipresent

When “Saturday Night Fever” came out in 1977, the small film about an Italian kid from Brooklyn who moonlighted as a disco dancer became a force of nature. It rocketed star John Travolta into the stratosphere, and the soundtrack album, heavy on the Bee Gees, sold 25 million copies—many before the film was even out in theaters.

Director John Maggio’s new documentary

Filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West make documentaries about extraordinary women. Their Oscar-nominated 2018 “RBG” followed around the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Cohen and West have returned with “Julia,” which traces the rise of Julia Child from her Southern California beginnings to becoming the world’s first celebrity chef. “Like a lot of people in my generation, I

Over a twenty-year stretch, half a million people have died from opioids, according to the CDC. And one of the crisis’s major killers is OxyContin, which earned the already-wealthy Sackler family billions of dollars.

Even though the family’s firm, Purdue Pharma, is now in bankruptcy proceedings and ordered by courts to pay billions in penalties and compensation, members of the Sackler