EXCLUSIVE: When the Eaton Fire tore through the Altadena neighborhood of Los Angeles on January 7 it reduced thousands of houses and buildings to ashes, including the homes of award-winning filmmaker Ondi Timoner and her brother, producer David Timoner. Ondi was in Europe with her wife, the…

EXCLUSIVE: Joachim Trier is seated by a big picture window that looks out over the mountain range that hugs the valley where the Telluride Film Festival is located. He's here with a big picture of his own, Sentimental Value, which was a mammoth hit in Cannes, winning the Grand Prix. "That was…

Very, very few people have been allowed into the Chauvet cave in Southeastern France since it was discovered in 1994 and found to contain ancient cave paintings dating back more than 30,000 years. Fortunately, one of those admitted was filmmaker Werner Herzog, who was granted permission to bring…

EXCLUSIVE: There's no getting away from it: Colin Farrell is hot. To be sure, we are seated before a mammoth fire pit, the centerpiece of a swish enclave where well-heeled attendees at the Telluride Film Festival like to stay. But the heat I'm referring to comes from Farrell’s scorching…

The most famous cover in the history of The New Yorker magazine may be for the March 29, 1976 issue, a drawing known as "View of the World from 9th Avenue." You've no doubt seen it: 9th Avenue large and expansive in the foreground, with 10th Avenue and the Hudson River distinguishable in the…

If there is one clear thing director Daniel Roher’s nifty narrative filmmaking debut, Tuner, proves, it is that Leo Woodall is the real deal as the next big leading man in movies. You might know the British actor from Netflix’s limited series One Da…

Merle Haggard was an escape artist. The future country music legend broke out of juvenile hall and prison 17 times by his own count as a teenager and young man. But his greatest escape was getting out of Oildale, the hardscrabble town in California where he grew up, the son of refugees from the…

In the opening moments of Edward Berger’s new film, Ballad Of A Small Player, Colin Farrell, as a con man hiding from his past in Macau, groggily tries to climb out of bed, rubbing his eyes, and simply says, “Oh, f*ck!” It is a great beginning, even if it did remind me of myself after the alarm…

EXCLUSIVE: In between the albums Born To Run and Born In The USA that made him the world’s biggest rock star, Bruce Springsteen took a radical detour, channeling the crippling alienation and crushing depression he was feeling into the seminal album Nebraska. Accomplished in a bedroom with orange shag…

Poetry courtesy of The Boss and The Bard is filling the mountain air at the Telluride Film Festival. Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics can be as potent as William Shakespeare’s verse. When Jeremy Allen White performs ‘Born In the USA’  during Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From…

The 52nd Telluride Film Festival is barely more than a day old and already there is a strong theme running through the new films here: art as a life altering experience. In Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, depression causes the superstar musician…

Movies about the relationship between a person and one of God’s creatures is becoming a virtual genre of its own. My Penguin Friend, Penguin Lessons, The Starling and Penguin Bloom are recent examples, the latter starring Naomi Watts who was also on…