FILLY BROWN, directed by Youssef Delara (who also wrote the script) and Michael D. Olmos, falls into a recognizable Sundance genre:  sagas of poor young women (usually ethnic) struggling to escape their poverty and make a better life.  Celebrated examples in festival history include Girlfight and Real Women Have Curves; Filly Brown, while […]

  Sundance is sometimes thrilling, but it can also be an ordeal.  Especially when the films are good, but not great.  And even more so if you arrive with limited tickets, and are left to the tender mercies of the Wait List lines (which, given Sundance’s idiosyncratic approach to Wait Lists, requires standing on each […]

  The actress Lake Bell’s feature-film writing/directing debut IN A WORLD… has a fresh slant on showbiz comedy, and it’s both consistently likable and sometimes very funny.  It’s also sloppy, overbroad, predictable and so technically flat that it hurts the eyes to watch–but that’s what first films are for. The general idea of In A World…, in which various […]

> Michael Mohan’s SAVE THE DATE, which premiered this afternoon at Sundance, doesn’t earn its points from an original premise. It concerns 2 divergent sisters, Sarah (Lizzy Caplan) and Beth (Alison Brie), but mostly Sarah. While Beth, the control-freak, is relentlessly planning her upcoming wedding to musician Andrew (Martin Starr), the commitment-phobic Sarah is about […]

  PRESENCE (Neon – TBD):  Steven Soderbergh has always appreciated, and often demanded, a challenge, and in Presence he and screenwriter David Koepp have taken an original approach to the haunted house genre.  The point of view character here is the ghost itself, who we’re told has an inchoate consciousness that can’t distinguish between past […]

  REBEL IN THE RYE (no distrib):  Danny Strong’s first film as a director is a biography of J. D. Salinger (Nicholas Hoult), and it hits all the Salinger bullet points:  his early struggles to get published, his spectacularly doomed romance with legendary playwright’s daughter Oona O’Neill (he lost her to Charlie Chaplin), his difficult […]

  LOVE LIES BLEEDING (A24 – March 8):  Rose Glass has followed her brilliant horror movie Saint Maud by exchanging austerity for pulp.  Love Lies Bleeding (co-written with Weronika Tofilska) is engulfed by the spirit of overripeness, to the point where it embraces the garish and even tbe flat-out ludicrous.  The film doesn’t entirely work, […]

  Plot and character revelations are a critical part of James Marsh’s subtle, complex spy drama SHADOW DANCER, adapted by Tom Bradby from his own novel, so I’ll be circumspect in describing its plot beyond the initial set-up.  (Then again, I saw it at an 8:30AM screening at Sundance, so I’m not altogether sure I […]