PALM TREES AND POWER LINES (no distrib): Jamie Dack’s first feature film (from a script written with Audrey Findlay) means to unsettle, and it does. 17-year old Lea (Lily McInerny) is stuck in a dead-end Southern California beach town at the end of summer with a distracted single mom (Gretchen Mol) and friends whose […]
NANNY (no distrib): Think Netflix’s Maid, but as a (sort of) horror movie. Aisha (Anna Diop) is an undocumented Senegalese immigrant in New York who works as a nanny for the daughter of a well-off couple, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector), in order to earn money she can send to her young […]
HONK FOR JESUS. SAVE YOUR SOUL (no distrib): Scandal-ridden mega-churches aren’t exactly fresh territory for screens big (The Tears of Tammy Faye) or small (The Righteous Gemstones), with tones that range from wildly comic to solemn. Adamma Edo’s feature debut doesn’t have much to add to the subject, but it does have Sterling K. […]
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 […]
It’s the second consecutive Virtual Sundance, with safety, convenience and isolation in place of weather, shuttle buses and community. Over the next several days, we’ll be bringing you reviews of several Sundance premieres, some of which will find their way into theaters, with more likely to make their public appearances via VOD and streaming […]
This may be heresy, but the virtual Sundance Film Festival went so smoothly that if they offered it as an option in a hopefully pandemic-free 2022, I’d seriously consider passing up the freezing weather and the waits for delayed, packed shuttle buses to stay at home. Sure, I’d miss the communal experience, but on the […]
ON THE COUNT OF THREE: There was a well-deserved Sundance screenwriting prize for Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch’s script for Jerrod Carmichael’s big-screen directing debut, which threads an almost impossible needle as a comedy about suicidal depression. (In an unintentional way, the film is a companion piece to the festival’s How It Ends, also […]
MAYDAY: The fantasy whatzit is a Sundance staple, and Mayday fits into that category. (Paradise Hills was a recent example from a past festival.) Ana (Grace Van Patten), short for Anastasia, is an ignored and abused waitress who finds herself swimming through a portal to what turns out to be an otherwise deserted island […]