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It is indeed a strange year when one of the biggest movies at the Venice Festival is a little British comedy with a title that misleads some theatergoers into expecting a typical period piece. The Duke is neither typical nor a costume drama.

Beginning in 1952 when the Cecil B.  deMille Award was presented to its namesake visionary director, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has awarded its most prestigious prize 66 times.

During this time of the coronavirus pandemic and death, it seems frivolous to focus on fashion. However, because of the dire world state, it is good to find something beautiful, creative, and artistic to remind us that despite the dire months, optimism and a new normal may rise again.

The highly-anticipated documentary about climate activist Greta Thunberg premiered to what would be deafening applause in a year of social closeness not distancing. Still, the atmosphere in the half-empty theater was filled with cheers and appreciation and rightfully so.

On October 30, 1968, two young hustlers rang the doorbell of a house in Laurel Canyon. They were invited in by a 69-year-old man dressed in a robe.

What if 15 years from now, a dating service called Soulmates had a scientific method to find your true soul mate? What would you do? Would you take the test and then what? That is what the AMC TV show Soulmates explores in several different ways in an episodic anthology where Malin Akerman plays the lead as Martha. The 42-year old Swedish American actress plays a woman who has had bad luck in love and marriage and decides to take extreme measures to meet her soul mate.

No screaming fans line the red carpet. No one has camped out for days to get a glimpse of a superstar.

“Even a year before the autumn afternoon in October 1952 when I started shooting Pather Panthali in a field of white kaash* flowers, the thought of taking up filmmaking as a career hadn’t occurred to me at all. ” So writes legendary director Satyajit Ray, in the opening paragraph of “My Years with Apu: A Memoir.

Mary Louise Brooks was born on November 14, 1906, in Cherryvale, Kansas. She described her hometown as “a typical Midwestern community where the inhabitants prayed in the parlor and practiced incest in the barn.

Eve’s Bayou is the film that introduced the then 36-year-old Kasi Lemmons to audiences as a director. It is also the film that Ebert once rated “number one on the forgotten list”.