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Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 2 is the latest installment in writer-director-star Kevin Costner’s planned four-part film series, which opened in the U.S. this past July to many poor reviews, bemused viewer reaction and disappointing box office numbers.

This second three-hour tranche of Wild West-themed soap-operatic drama, premiering at Venice, has basically the same problems as its predecessor: too much setup and not enough payoff; jagged editing that only highlights the lack of harmony between its disparate narrative strands; and cliché-tinged production values that often make it feel corny and old-fashioned, and not in a good way. And that’s allowing for the assumption that it’s aimed at the geriatric market who loved Costner’s pseudo-revisionist Western blockbuster Dances With Wolves back in the day and his return turn to Western-adjacent form with recent TV hit Yellowstone.

And yet, despite all that, Chapter 2 proves to be more...

In “Babylon,” Damien Chazelle’s film about silent-era Hollywood stars who burned as brightly as they, sadly, did briefly, Li Jun Li plays Lady Fay Zhu, a singer, dancer, actor and sometime title card writer whose ability to make an entrance — even in the midst of the most decadent bacchanal you’ve ever seen — enables her to steal scenes from co-stars like Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. Inspired by the real life and career of Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, Li worked closely with writer-director Chazelle to pay tribute to the Hollywood trailblazer while ensuring that she blazes a trail of her own; after watching her suck venom from the neck of Robbie’s unconscious Nellie Laroy, you’ll never think of a snakebite the same way again.

Your character is inspired by the career and life of Anna May Wong. What about her life principally informed your performance?...

An already moving film is given an unforeseen blush of relevance in these trying times by refracting an immigration story through the prism of a childhood experience of forced isolation. In Samuel Kishi Leopo’s tender and sincere “Los Lobos,” it is not a virus but poverty, uncertain legal status and stranger danger that makes the world outside the little family’s dingy apartment into a perilous place. Still, the rhythms of quarantine are painfully recognizable — the bursts of creativity followed by long stretches of boredom, the closeness and the squabbling, the intense yearning to be out in the world, nose pressed against the window pane.

For Max and Leo (two superbly natural performances from real-life brothers Maximiliano and Leonardo Najar Marquez), the loneliness is exacerbated because of the strangeness of this new country, with only the far-off promise of a trip to “Disney” to look forward to. Brought across...

Stars: Monique Gabriela Curnen, Kathy Baker, Luke Ganalon, Jon Jon Briones, Keram Malicki-Sánchez, Maree Cheatham, Jasper Cole, Victoria Cruz, Jill Jordan, Cici Lau | Written by Patrick Cunningham, William Day Frank | Directed by Patrick Cunningham

Genre movies based in the home usually take one of a few routes. They can be a haunted house tale, they can be a home invasion movie or they can be something else. Anyone Home? sits nicely in that ‘something else’ category.

It centres on a single mum, Camila (Monique Gabriela Curnen), who is struggling financially and mentally while bringing up her son. She thinks her luck has changed though when she gets a job house-sitting a model home. All she has to do is decorate the house to look good for when would be buyers look round. But it doesn’t take too long for even that to be too much for her.

Anyone Home?...

This writer hit the set of the then-shooting Patrick Cunningham-directed feature Model Home in the La area enclave of Santa Clarita on July 9th and while there chatted with the filmmaker regarding the project as well as with co-producer Will Clevinger (The Devil’s Carnival) and more.

Shooting Day 19 of 20 in the entirely suburban and seemingly white-bread environ, it was hard not to feel that aliens with a hankering for Reese’s Pieces and nuclear families with daughters named "Carol Anne" would both feel entirely comfortable on the set of Model Home. The rented residence in which the production had set up shop and the homes that surrounded it were dotted with manicured lawns and tricycles with colorful handle-bar streamers, abandoned apparently by the pre-pubescent children who had ridden them. Smart perhaps, as what was shooting inside Model Home was fairly disconnected from the tranquility the family-centric locale strove for.