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Undoubtedly one of the largest and best-endowed foreign film festivals in Los Angeles, the Israel Film Festival (November 12-26, 2019) has its formula down: two full weeks of screenings in Beverly Hills’ Ahrya Fine Arts Theater and Encino’s Laemmle Town Center 5, kicked off by a grand gala on Opening Night at the Saban Theatre. And it has worked well and consistently for 33 years now.

Once again, the Arclight Cinemas in Culver City hosted the Asian World Film Festival (AWFF), November 6-14, 2019. Now in its 5th edition, AWFF featured films from more than 50 countries from the entire Asian continent, from the Middle East to Japan, Russia to South-East Asia.

Young Ahmed is a 2019 drama, directed by the gifted Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose intensely humane realist dramas have already twice earned them the Palme d’Or in Cannes. Yet in Young Ahmed, the brothers dare to take a controversial turn with a portrait of a radicalized Muslim teen.

After making music professionally for ten years, Ghanaian artist Blitz Bazawule felt he needed to extend his creative voice beyond rhythms and notes. Impelled to show the world an African aesthetic he hadn’t seen represented before, this first time writer/director put his focus on creating The Burial Of Kojo – a piece of magical realism that he felt was attached to the spirit of his continent and that reminded him of the narratives told through his grandmother’s stories.

With his compatriots, Radu Jude, Cristian Mungiu and Crisit Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest, The Treasure) is one of the most prominent members of the Romanian New Wave, which have been instrumental in putting their country’s cinema on the world map over the last 15 years. His latest opus, The Whistlers, is a neo-noir thriller set mainly in La Gomera, the second smallest of Spain’s Canary Islands, where Cristi (Vlad Ivanov, Mungiu’s regular seen in Graduation and last year’s László Nemes Sunset), a corrupt Bucharest cop involved in drug money laundering, has been summoned by a local gangster.

For over 40 years the HFPA has recorded famous and celebrated actresses, actors and filmmakers. The world's largest collection of its kind - over 10,000  items - is now in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Margaret Herrick Library.

One in an occasional series exploring the state of Hollywood films in global markets. Just last year, the Guardian Australia lamented that Australian film and TV was fighting for its life as Hollywood blockbusters made up 84% of the country’s box office.

Autumn 1990. A group of Western diplomats arrives in Albania to investigate human rights abuses by the communist regime still in power.

Bollywood - the Indian film industry - is largest in the world in terms of the amount of content produced every year. Yet it has been known mainly for its larger-than-life musical productions.

Before Robert Pattinson went on to fight criminals as Batman he wrestled mentally and physically with Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse. The two men drive each other insane on a lonely island.