Kirsten Johnson not only finds a way to pay tribute to her, still-alive, father, but gives us a much-needed, and uplifting, therapy session on death in her playfully irreverent documentary “Dick Johnson is Dead.”

In the wake of her passing last Friday, Focus Features has decided to re-release the 2018 Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic “On the Basis of Sex” in select theaters this week.

The release date of Wes Anderson's “The French Dispatch” was changed three times; first, it was July 24th, then it became October 16th, 2020, and, finally, a TBD sometime in 2021 was decided by Searchlight.

A sequel to Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 comedy classic, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” has been shot and screened for a select few industry types. I had a nice little chuckle today when it was revealed to me that the upcoming Borat sequel will actually be called “Borat: Gift of Pornographic Monkey to Vice President Mikhael Pence to Make Benefit Recently Diminished Nation of Kazakhstan.”

Francis Lee’s “Ammonite” has a respectable 80% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 75 Metacritic score, but one does have to beg to ask the question, what is NEON hiding? The studio behind “Ammonite” has been very nitpicky in regard to screening Lee’s film for critics. That’s all fine and dandy, but, as it turns out, this is the only movie of the fall festival season whose publicists refused to send me a digital viewing link. Is it because buzz is dwindling?

“Lovers Rock” may be the bolder movie, but, in “Mangrove,” director Steve McQueen runs circles around Aaron Sorkin’s “other” 2020 courtroom drama - this, my friends, is how it’s done.

I interviewed Lulu Wang back in 2019 when her above-average Sundance hit “The Farewell” was about to get released. The 37-year-old Chinese-born filmmaker struck me as rather snide and rude, which disappointed me, considering I really liked her film.

Aaron Sorkin’s bombastic “Trial of the Chicago 7” screened for press last night. The Twitter reactions were mostly positive, some flat-out raves, mostly from Oscar pundits who are currently very hungry for contenders to emerge in such a lame duck year.

Disney has postponed the release of fall blockbusters such as Marvel’s “Black Widow,” Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” and Kenneth Branagh’s “Death on the Nile” by several months. All will now be released in 2021. The theatrical year continues to be destroyed by this neverending pandemic.

Miranda July sees the world in such beautifully unique ways. In “Kajillionaire,” she tries to show us how we all need warmth and human connection in life, no matter how much we try to self-isolate ourselves. How’s that for relevance? Although the film feels slight at times, there is an abundance of humanism in July’s screenplay. The strangeness of the whole thing may distance some, but this writer-director is a true original.

A stark reminder of the long-lasting cultural effects of COVID-19 was reaffirmed this morning when The South By Southwest Film Festival announced that it was already planning a digital edition of the March festival. SXSW thus joins next January’s Sundance Film Festival, as another major U.S. film festival going the way of digital screenings.

If you’ve seen any of the Tom Cruise-starring Mission Impossible movies then you already know just how brazenly reckless Cruise can be when it comes to performing his own stunts. The 55-year-old actor went as far as firing his own insurance company so he could perform some of the stunts he executed in those films.

I didn’t expect Aaron Sorkin’s “Trial of the Chicago 7” to get a theatrical release via Netflix, although there was a rumor that it could happen in October, however, nobody expected it to hit cinemas this coming Friday. That’s exactly what we’ve learned tonight. Of course, the release won’t include any New York or Los Angeles theaters since they are still closed in those states. The rest of the country will be able to catch Sorkin’s latest, which is being touted as a major Oscar contender for next year’s Oscars ceremony (I have my doubts).

Michael Chapman, one of the great American cinematographers, has passed away at his home aged 84. Chapman was married to screenwriter Amy Holden Jones. His father-in-law, Joe Brun, was an Oscar-nominated cinematographer who had emigrated from France in the early 20th century.

I watched 36 out of the 50 films that were part of this year’s TIFF lineup. I’ll write about my ten favorites tomorrow, but today TIFF announced that Chloe Zhao’s “Nomadland” won the prestigious People’s Choice Award, which is usually seen as a very good precursor for the Best Picture statuette at the Oscars. Searchlight will release the movie on December 4th.

Emma Seligman’s “Shiva Baby,” her feature debut, was originally slated to premiere at SXSW this past March. A few days before its world premiere, the COVID-19 virus was declared a pandemic, and every event in the country, including SXSW, was forced to be canceled.

Woody Allen’s 49th film as writer-director, “A Rainy Day in New York,” put in the can in 2018, never came out in the U.S. due to Allen being axed via 25-year-old #MeToo allegations, which he still fervently denies. The film was completed in 2018, but its distributor, Amazon Studios, halted the release of the film following the controversy.

It wasn’t that there weren’t any good movies, no, as you will read below, there were highlights, but this year’s 77th Venice Film Festival bravely taking place during a pandemic resulted in obvious limitations and most definitely hampered the quality of the usually stellar lineup Festival boss Alberto Barbera is known for churning out year after year.