Here’s another World Dramatic competition highlight from this past year’s Sundance Film Festival. A film filled with humanism, “Luzzu” is directed by Alex Camilleri, who used his years of life experience with Maltese fishermen to not just make a movie about them, but to also cast these non-professionals as his actors.

“The Last Duel” Is Ridley Scott’s take on Kurosawa’s “Rashomon.” A impeccably well-acted, based-on-true-story epic set in 14th century Paris, the film is an adaptation of Eric Jager’s book and it does indeed use the influential three-points-of-view storytelling style that Kurosawa used in his own classic.

A film like “Lamb,” with, on-paper at least, such a strange plot, needs to be very aware of the trappings that might come in relying too much on its central gimmick.

The risk of making a single-location drama, or otherwise known as a “chamber piece,” is risky in that it could suck the cinematic out of a film. The staginess that occurs when you attempt such a film can be seen as downright theatrical, a screenplay actually fit for the stage rather than the screen.

Nanfu Wang follow-up to her 'One Child Nation' is an HBO documentary titled ”In the Same Breath”, it deals with the Chinese Communist Party coverup of COVID-19 during the early stages of the outbreak.

CODA,” which stands for Child of Deaf Adults, features the kind of star-making-performance that can lift just about any mediocre script. Something tells me you’ll be hearing the name Emilia Jones many times in the years to come.

This documentary purports to be a profile on students going through the 2020 school year at an Oakland high school. As if the anxiety over test scores and college applications wasn’t enough, a pandemic was about to break — they just didn’t know it.

Critics are shocked, aghast, by Spanish visual artist Pascual Sisto's “John and the rHole” in which Charlie Shotwell an emotionless and psychopathic 13-year-old boy decides to drug and hold his parents and sister hostage in an unfinished concrete bunker.

Edson Oda’s none-too-subtle “Nine Days,” was a wildly ambitious, but pretentious, narrative feature won the screenwriting award at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

M. Night Shyamalan is a brand. His name alone being stamped on a trailer can bring asses to seats. In his latest film, the India-born director squanders the promise he showed in his 2016 comeback vehicle, “Split,” by again riffing on a “Twilight Zone”-like premise, but with mixed results.

The late Anthony Bourdain seemed to have the perfect life: a young daughter, money, and the kind of show that felt more like a vacation than actual work. The venerable chef traveled the world, to the most interesting cities, eating the best food those locations had to offer and rejoicing in the simplest pleasures of life. But that didn’t seem to be enough.

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s filmmaking debut, “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” is the kind of documentary that can actually change the shape of how history is written. It presents to the viewer never-before-seen footage from the Harlem Cultural Festival or what is otherwise known as “Black Woodstock.”

As I sat down in my usual go-to aisle seat at the Cannes Film Festival’s famous DeBussy theater, I had more-than-decent expectations for Danielle Lessovitz’ “Port Authority,” which was produced by none other than Martin Scorsese. Fast track two years later, and the film is being given a limp-dick release on VOD and “select theaters.”

A movie like “Cruella” isn’t as edgy as it thinks it is. It’s a Disney-friendly take on what should have been very dark and disturbing material. Overdriven by a soundtrack infused with pop songs from the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, director Craig Gillespie’s origin story of the “101 Dalmatians” villainess is a lot of movie, in fact 133 minutes worth of it.

After a while, I just couldn’t deal with Zack Snyder’s “Army of the Dead.” I tried, I really did. It starts off great, but then it goes on and on. The fact of the matter is, that unless you infuse some much-needed fresh DNA Into a zombie movie like in “28 Days Later,” then you won’t convince me that it’s a movie worth seeing.

Mexican director Michel Franco’s “New Order,” a dystopian shocker that resonates in these deeply troubling times, is not just his most grueling movie to date, and that’s already a feat in itself, but also his best and most accomplished work. If you were already not a fan of the guy’s work, then this won’t necessarily convert you, but regardless, it’ll convince you of his technical talents as a director.

Shot in secret and smuggled out of Iran in 2019, Mohammad Rasoulof’s “There is No Evil” is comprised of four short stories about men connected to the death penalty. Why was Rasoulof’s film snuck out of the country and sent to the Berlin Film Festival, where it won the top prize in 2020? The answer lies in Rasoulof’s anthology being subtly critical of its home country’s horrid usage of capital punishment.