“How Do You Measure a Year?” is a familiar lyric from a song in the Broadway show “Rent”; it’s also the title of a fascinating and experimental short documentary from Jay Rosenblatt (“When We Were Bullies”). Each year on his daughter Ella’s birthday, Rosenblatt filmed himself asking her a similar series of questions, including:

“How would you say we get along?”

“What are your hopes for the future?”

It’s always great to be first.  This weekend the nation’s capital saw the premiere of DC/DOX, a new film festival dedicated to truth in filmmaking. 

Opening night kicked off at the National Portrait Gallery, where festival founders Jamie Shor and Sky Sitney spoke about the necessity of founding a new venue for documentaries in the capital in the wake of AFI DOCS, which used to be

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