TO THE STARS (no distrib): Tales of small-town outcasts are a regular feature at Sundance, and Martha Stephens’ drama is an accomplished example of the genre. Shannon Bradley-Colleary’s script is set in 1960s Oklahoma (the film is splendidly shot by Andrew Reed in a black and white that recalls The Last Picture Show), centering on Iris (Kara Hayward, from Moonrise Kingdom), whose mother Francie (Jordana Spiro) is so miserable that she passes on her pain to her daughter, and whose father Hank (Shea Whigham) is kind but ineffectual. Iris gets no respite from her family life at school, where she’s the designated target of just about everyone, especially a clique led by Clarissa (Madison Beaty). Everything changes when the mysterious, glamorous Maggie (Liana Liberato) moves to town and bonds with Iris. Maggie, alas, has her own secrets, which in that time and place are eventually going to catch up with her. Hayward and Liberato are sensitive and charismatic, and the adults, who also include a surprisingly dramatic Tony Hale as Maggie’s father, and Adelaide Clemens as the town’s sympathetic hairdresser, are uniformly top-notch. Iris’s path isn’t a surprising one, but Stephens and Bradley-Colleary deliver the story with vivid honesty and memorable period detail, a fine example of Sundance 101.
SISTER AIMEE (no distrib): An extreme fictionalization of the true life story of the wildly successful Los Angeles preacher and faith healer Aimee Semple McPherson, and particularly her notorious disappearance in 1926. Filmmakers Samantha Buck and Marie Schlingmann, making their feature debut, seem to have decided that there was no reason to stop at incorporating the tropes of one genre, when 4 or 5 more could do. So Sister Aimee is sort of a biography, sort of a western, sort of a female empowerment tale, sort of a musical, and sort of a buddy comedy. The Coen Brothers may be capable of mixing that many tones and emerging with something remarkable, but few others are, and Buck and Schlingmann aren’t ready to be added to that list. In their telling, Sister Aimee (Anna Margaret Hollyman) left town to be with her married lover Kenny (Michael Mosley), alternately instructing her assistants to claim that she’d been raptured away, drowned or kidnapped. Along the way to hide out in Mexico, however, Aimee and Kenny took on a guide/translator known as Rey (Andrea Suarez Paz), and Buck and Schlingmann turn out to be more interested in Rey than in anyone else. There are certainly striking touches in Sister Aimee, and the mix of tones is sometimes inventive, but the story the film ends up telling feels imposed on the material, and the lack of an organizing principle makes it feel long even at 87 minutes.
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