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Part mystery and part history lesson, director Jacqueline Olive’s Always in Season is an ambitious and extraordinarily timely documentary about race relations, equality under the law, and the lingering aftereffects of a dark and violent past that still lurk, like a latent infection, in too many parts of the United States. Narrated by Danny Glover, and melding the story of the suspicious 2014 death of an African American teenager found hanging from a swing set with a broader exploration of the country’s history of lynching, the film is a pained howl for justice and reconciliation in a divided America.

A three-time Golden Globe winner, composer Justin Hurwitz met journalist Ana Maria Bahiana at HFPA’s office in West Hollywood where he talked about his process of working with director Damien Chazelle.  They have done four movies – Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, Whiplash, La La Land and First Man.

Between the Superbowl and freezing temperatures across much of the Midwest and northeastern United States, this weekend turned out to be a dull affair at the domestic box office. Glass remained number one again with a $9.

Do stars watch their own movies? Some do, but others steer clear of them. Claudia Cardinale recently told the Hollywood Foreign Press that she isn’t nostalgic but might watch a film of hers if it is shown on television.

The world – or at least Park City, UT – looks like it has been dipped in milk – but there are still splashes of color, and perennial black is always a staple.

This year’s Sundance film fest left no one wanting. While in previous years there was all too often a focus on “edgy” fare, the kind that sometimes becomes a critical darling without attracting audiences, the variety of genres represented in and out of competition this year was wide and all-inclusive.

Documentaries are no longer feature films’ poor little relation and it's in no small way thanks to the Sundance Festival that has attracted, promoted and nursed many of them to successful runs, first in theaters,  and later on cable and streaming channels. It was at Park City that Alex Gibney premiered one of the hottest docs four years ago, Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief, and two years later Vice President Al Gore brought the sequel to his climate change film An Inconvenient Truth which itself caused a stir in 2006.

Knock Down the House is an apt title for the documentary by Rachel Lears, which follows the campaigns of four insurgent candidates as they try to pull upset primary victories against Democratic incumbents ahead of the 2018 mid-term elections. The four women are part, as we are appraised at the beginning of the film, of a nationwide grassroots movement sparked in opposition to Donald Trump’s election, which aims to wrest control of the House of Representatives from Republicans but also to reshape the Democratic establishment with an infusion of young, independent-minded citizen-candidates.

PARK CITY-  The Great Hack, by Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim's (previously at Sundance with The Square) is a deep dive into the election influence scandal which appears to have had an outsized role in shaping the outcome of the Brexit and Trump elections and favoring the rise of global populism. The film follows two main characters.

The world is a big place, but as the largest democracy, the United States enjoys an outsized percentage of its political attention. And as 2019 seems certain to become only more turbulent, with a slow but steady drip of revelations from various investigations into the campaign actions and business dealings of President Donald Trump, that focus figures to intensify.