If we’re lucky we grow up with our parents and grandparents present in our lives. But very few of us have a grandparent who helped found one of the major Hollywood studios. Filmmaker Gregory Orr learned one day just how powerful was his step-grandfather, Jack L. Warner, when the studio mogul ran every red light along Sunset Blvd. A watchful police officer pulled him over, but upon catching the name on the driver’s license, let Warner and

Taylor Sheridan has nine shows on TV and more coming. The Oscar-nominated writer is the co-creator of “Yellowstone,” the cable TV modern western starring Kevin Costner that has racked up a rabid fanbase and been a serious moneymaker for the Paramount Network. Sheridan’s list of accolades—to say nothing of his bank account—will only continue to grow.

Yet as famous as Sheridan is

CANNES, FRANCE - Some firsts at the Cannes Festival which starts today, an Italian contingent in the competition slate and what I look forward to the most this year.

At the helm of the festival this 76th edition a woman, Iris Knobloch, who replaces Pierre Lescure as president of the festival after a tenure that lasted six years. Programmer Thierry Frémaux and she already know each other

When Brock Turner was handed down a sentence of just six months in prison for a sexual assault case that occurred on the Stanford University campus in 2015, a collective outrage at the light sentence eventually led to a successful recall campaign against the judge who decided the case, Aaron Persky.  Many activists, especially those who decried a wealthy white man such as Turner punished so lightly, cheered—at least, at first.  The fallout from

When Kevin Abrams started work on his documentary “I Got a Monster” in 2018, he was determined that retelling the story of Baltimore’s corrupt Gun Trace Task Force not traffic in “ruin porn,” a staple of the HBO series “The Wire.”

“It’s nicknamed Charm City, and I really got why,” Abrams, a New Jersey native, said from his home in Los Angeles.  “As an East Coast

Critics have not been kind to “Empire of Light,” the film about cinema.  Sam Mendes’s film is not a “Cinema Paradiso” redux nor, I think, does it aim to be, but comes across as a more unequal treatment of what the medium gives us and has always given us, this immediate entry into our dreams, the world as we see it, remember it, as it affects us, the images that in certain films become so iconic as to define us to ourselves and sometimes make us see ourself within

Willem Dafoe is no stranger to unhinged performances. Perhaps that’s why he plays both creepy and villainous so damn well. But what if a filmmaker were to take that extraordinary talent and energy, and force the Oscar-nominated actor to act alone, essentially portraying a character who is penned up?

That’s the starting point for “Inside,” which sees Dafoe’s art thief Nemo become trapped