THE BRONZE is an entertaining but standard-issue R-rated American comedy, equal parts Bad Teacher and any Danny McBride vehicle, which makes one wonder what it’s doing in the Dramatic Competition line-up at the Sundance Film Festival.  (McBride’s breakout movie The Foot Fist Way also premiered at Sundance, but in the more genre-oriented Midnight section.)  Another similarity to […]

  Due to our upcoming Sundance Film Festival coverage, ratings posts for the remainder of the week are likely to consist largely of charts without text.  In addition, we may not be able to respond promptly to reader Comments requests for extra ratings.  (On the other hand, Sundance reviews!)

  Of all the films in this year’s US Dramatic Competition at Sundance, Kat Candler’s HELLION was the one that most closely matched what’s become a festival template: Aggressively shaky handheld camerawork:  Check. Small-town dysfunctional family (alcoholic/grief-stricken division):  Check. Third act sparked by violence:  Check. Rebellious yet sensitive and misunderstood young protagonist:  Check. Commercially successful […]

  For SHOWBUZZDAILY’s full set of Sundance capsule reviews, click here.   What kind of filmmaker does Mona Fastvold want to be?  It’s an existential question that comes up often at Sundance, where artistic and industry cred are often judged at the same time.  THE SLEEPWALKER, Fastvold’s first film as director and (with Brady Corbet, […]

  Of all the titles in this year’s Sundance US Dramatic Competition line-up, none may have been more promising on paper than GOD’S POCKET.  Based on a novel by Pete Dexter, it marked the feature directing debut of the actor John Slattery, whose work behind the camera on Mad Men has produced some of the […]

  The post-apocalyptic sci-fi western, which once must have seemed revolutionary and innovative, is now (it dates back at least to 1975’s A Boy and His Dog) an established subgenre.  Jake Paltrow’s entry into the field, YOUNG ONES, was roundly panned at Sundance, possibly because of that familiarity, but it’s a reasonably ambitious and quite […]

  The Dramatic Competition at Sundance this year featured a pair of films that were largely built on duologues between two strong protagonists.  Attention was mostly–and properly–focused on Whiplash, which ended up winning both of the Festival’s top prizes, but Peter Sattler’s CAMP X-RAY is also worthy of some note. Camp X-Ray is set at […]

  The writing team of David Wain and Michael Showalter (Wain directs) certainly knew that THEY CAME TOGETHER would be far from the first parody of romantic comedy movies to come along.  Date Movie opened back in 2008, Friends With Benefits, although it had other fish to fry, featured a dead-on film-within-the-film satire that starred […]