My Courses

It’s early, but the Berlinale has already granted three enriching films of distinctly different backgrounds. In fact, usually for these dispatches, I try to pair films of similar genres. In this instance, I think having these works together clues you into the variety on display at this year’s festival.  “Small Things Like These,” an intimate…

“The Arc of Oblivion” is a documentary about a lot of things, including the futility of its own existence. Writer-director Ian Cheney, who also narrates, presents himself as, basically, a hoarder, mainly of hard drives containing photos, video and audio of various things in his life, some of them undeniably important and others that fall under…

In an election year full of anxiety, documentary filmmaker Dan Partland has given us another reason to lose sleep at night. The director of “Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump” returns with “God & Country,” a sobering examination of the rise of Christian Nationalism in the United States, collecting an array of experts, authors and…

The Spirit Awards, hosted by Film Independent, will take place Sunday, February 25, and once again will be held under a tent on the beach in Santa Monica. The organization is helmed by its President, Josh Welsh, and Brenda Robinson, the Chair of the board of directors. I was pleased to be appointed recently to the Advisory Board of this…

Lily Sullivan, who broke through with an impressively physical performance in last year’s “Evil Dead Rise,” gives a remarkable one-woman show in Matt Vesely’s effective “Monolith,” a sci-fi thriller that somehow finds a way to make podcasting cinematic (mostly). It does so by mining what feels like that current of rising anxiety in the international consciousness…