The kickoff of the seventh annual Arlington International Film Festival is a showing of “The Promise,” a 2016 documentary of special interest to Cambridge’s Serbs. The festival itself draws more than 2,000 cinema fans annually to its more than 50 screenings.

The &pizza chain may have won the yearlong regulatory war for a space in Harvard Square, but neighborhood group resistance hasn’t gone away. Now it’s a short video ad and a couple of marketing tactics shown in it that has a few people agitated.

Student films from Cambridge and as far away as Australia, Canada, China, India, Mexico, Netherlands and Portugal are among 20 showing next month at the seventh Arlington International Film Festival.

Five pieces of media produced at Cambridge Community Television will be recognized as winners in the national Hometown Media Awards set to be given during the Alliance for Community Media conference planned for Minneapolis in July.

The Brattle Theatre’s “The Women Who Built Hollywood” series runs through March 8, jumpstarting a “Year of Women in Cinema” program meant to counteract some depressing film industry trends.

The rules of how to be the press in Cambridge haven’t become any more clear since Monday, when Mayor E. Denise Simmons spoke vaguely of rules that sounded unlike any traditional understanding of government-press interaction.

Though cable access television has been the mission since SCATV’s founding in 1983, online content and Boston Free Radio – also served up via the Web, but consumed primarily as audio – has become too big too ignore in the mission.

From nods to old-school musicals and homages to classic science fiction to touching coming-of-age stories and an eerily timely neo-noir nazi horror flick, there was no dearth of variety or diversity in cinemas that helped make 2016 a great year for film.

Sam Waterston, a Cambridge native, has had a career full of challenging and charismatic roles. Now he’s bringing gravitas to the John Madden film “Miss Sloane,” reflecting both his political interests and wish to work with top-notch creative ensembles.

In just her second feature film, “The Edge of Seventeen,” director and writer Kelly Fremon Craig has made one of the greatest coming-of-age films of the past 20 years. We asked her how she did it.