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, […]

  THE REPORT (Amazon):  Scott Z. Burns’s political expose is important and engrossing, but it’s composed of so much exposition that it may have trouble finding a mainstream audience.  (Which made Amazon’s decision to pay $14M to acquire it somewhat surprising.)  The film is concerned with two overlapping cover-ups over a period of years, set […]

  LIVING (no distrib):  Over the years, there’s periodically been talk about remaking Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 masterpiece Ikiru, including a rumored updated US version that would have starred Tom Hanks in the lead.  We finally have an English-language Ikiru in the more modest form of Oliver Hermanus’s Living, from a screenplay by the famed novelist […]

  LOVE ME (no distrib):  A truly existential romance.  Many years after the end of the human race, seemingly due to a combination of nuclear war and a new ice age, the two remaining artifacts with any ability to communicate are a smart ocean buoy and a satellite assigned to make contact with any life […]

  James Ponsoldt’s SMASHED (not to be confused with NBC’s Smash), which premiered in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance, is a new spin on a fairly old story.  The concept goes back (at least) to 1962’s Days of Wine and Roses:  a couple (Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Aaron Paul), very much in love with both […]

  Toy’s House wasn’t the only movie at this year’s Sundance about boys fending for themselves.  THE INEVITABLE DEFEAT OF MISTER AND PETE depicts a less voluntary version of the effort to keep going without adults, set in a much more hostile environment.  George Tillman Jr’s film, written by Michael Starrbury, is set in a […]

  THE DISCOVERY (Netflix):  Charlie McDowell’s first film was the ingenious metaphysical farce The One I Love, so there was plenty of reason to eagerly anticipate his follow-up.  He (and, once again, co-writer Justin Lader) return to some of the same philosophical territory again with The Discovery, but with less pleasing results.  The main action […]

  SHIRLEY (no distrib):  Josephine Decker’s film isn’t really a biography of the horror writer Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House, The Lottery), played here by Elizabeth Moss.  The script by Sarah Gubbins is based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell loosely inspired by Jackson’s life, and that fictional story has been changed […]