Title: Gun Hill Road Writer-director: Rashaad Ernesto Green Starring: Esai Morales, Judy Reyes, Harmony Santana, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Vincent Laresca, Dennis Johnson When critics use the shorthand phrase “festival film,” in either praise or derision, they essentially mean movies like writer-director Rashaad Ernesto Green’s feature debut, “Gun Hill Road”. From its evocative title and kind of self-consciously gritty style to its blowout emotional moments and hook-y social issue conceit transposed to a working-class familial setting, the film seems constructed in moralizing fashion to pull dramatic levers and kickstart off-screen dialogues, so it’s no particular surprise that it played in dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Its failure to land a top-tier indie…

Title: Cherry Directed By: Jeffrey Fine Starring: Kyle Gallner, Laura Allen, Brittany Robertson, Esai Morales, D.C. Pierson, Matt Walsh, Zosia Mamet When you’re doused in big budget, effect-heavy features week after week, it winds up being the simplest productions that really blow you away. Writer-director Jeffrey Fine’s newest film, Cherry, is just about as minimalistic as they come, but the results are huge. Cherry achieves a degree of empathy, entertainment and pleasure that most grander scale films never even come close to earning. Aaron (Kyle Gallner) always plays by his parents’ rules. From the day he was born, they bred him to become an Ivy League student and the time…

Variety is reporting that the Sci-Fi Channel has greenlit “Caprica,” the highly-anticipated prequel to the hit TV series “Battlestar Galactica”. Premiering with a TV miniseries in 2003, and the follow-up TV series in 2004, “Battlestar Galactica” is revamped take on the classic and sometime cheesy cult 70′s show about space pilgrims fleeing a race of deadly conqueror robots known as the Cylons, as they search for sanctuary on the long-lost planet Earth. It has become one of the cable channel’s biggest hits. “Caprica” will star Esai Morales, Eric Stoltz, Paula Malcomson and Polly Walker, and will be set 50 years prior to the start of “Galactica’s” and the Cylon invasion….