Film Festival

Sundance 2023 Reviews: “Cat Person,” “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields,” & “My Animal”

Posted February 3, 2023 by Mitch Salem

  CAT PERSON:  It seems to be necessary to establish one’s bona fides (or lack thereof) before commenting on Susanna Fogel’s Cat Person, so I’ll note that I’ve never read Kristen Roupenian’s celebrated New Yorker short story.  I’m given to understand, however, that the entire third act of Michelle Ashford’s adaptation is an add-on, which […]

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Film Festival

Sundance 2024 Film Reviews: “Presence” & “I Saw the TV Glow”

Posted January 26, 2024 by Mitch Salem

  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 […]

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Film Festival

SHOWBUZZDAILY Sundance Film Reviews: “Promising Young Woman,” “Four Good Days” & “Zola”

Posted January 28, 2020 by Mitch Salem

  PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN (Focus/Universal – April 17):  Emerald Fennell’s feature-film writing/directing debut has antecedents as old as the 1973 TV-movie The Girl Most Likely To… (co-written by Joan Rivers) and as recent as Killing Eve (for which Fennell served as Season 2 showrunner), with the added frisson of a #MeToo-driven storyline.  Cassie (Carey Mulligan) […]

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Film Festival

SHOWBUZZDAILY Virtual Sundance Reviews: “First Date” & “Pleasure”

Posted January 31, 2021 by Mitch Salem

  FIRST DATE:  Your regard for First Date is likely to directly relate to your nostalgia for the low-rent action comedies and Tarantino imitations of the 1990s and 2000s.  Those comedies were marked by idiot plots that piled on coincidences to justify rampant bloodshed, while no pseudo-Tarantino script would be complete without garrulous gangsters monologuing […]

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Film Festival

SHOWBUZZDAILY Sundance Film Festival Review: “The Farewell”

Posted February 3, 2019 by Mitch Salem

  THE FAREWELL (A24):  Lulu Wang’s The Farewell is what could be called Sundance Classic, a small, very personal film nurtured by the festival into wide enough attention that A24 paid $6M to release it.  It’s based on Wang’s own life, so much so that it would be a spoiler to reveal the caption to […]

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Film Festival

Sundance 2023 Review: “Fair Play”

Posted January 27, 2023 by Mitch Salem

  In a generally depressed indie film market, Netflix shelled out a reported $20M at Sundance for Chloe Domont’s feature writing/directing debut FAIR PLAY.  The splurge made sense:  Fair Play has that combination of strong storytelling and hot-button ideas on its mind that should allow it to temporarily take over the internet when it launches […]

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Film Festival

Sundance 2024 Film Reviews: “The American Society of Magical Negroes” & “Sasquatch Sunset”

Posted January 21, 2024 by Mitch Salem

  THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES (Focus/Universal – March 15):  The title of Kobi Libii’s first feature refers to the unfortunately well-established movie trope where a noble Black character exists only as a catalyst to make the white protagonist a better person.  (Think of everything from Driving Miss Daisy to The Green Mile, The Legend of Bagger Vance to Green […]

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Film Festival

SHOWBUZZDAILY SUNDANCE REVIEW: “Whiplash”

Posted January 27, 2014 by Mitch Salem

  Damien Chazelle’s powerhouse WHIPLASH is about the pursuit of not just excellence, but perfection, and on its own deliberately limited terms it doesn’t land far from that mark.  Whiplash won both the Grand Jury and the Audience prizes at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (only the 5th time that’s happened), and for all intents […]

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