Tag: Sundance Film Festival

Screening Room: 2025 Sundance Film Festival

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This year’s Sundance Film Festival just concluded. Your fearless correspondent delivered a roundup of the tensions roiling the festival at the moment, not to mention the films worth seeking out and the ones best avoided. That is available for your reading pleasure at PopMatters:

There seemed to be two questions on everyone’s mind at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The first was the same as ever at this festival or any other: “What have you seen?” This question is often academic because there aren’t many available tickets left to get by the time it’s asked – usually by a stranger in line for another film…

I also contributed some full-length reviews to Slant Magazine:

Screening Room: Sundance Review of ‘Veni Vidi Vici’

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My review of the Sundance Film Festival hit Veni Vidi Vici ran at Slant Magazine:

There’s a striking dissonance between the serene and realistic surface of Daniel Hoesel and Julia Niemann’s Veni Vidi Vici and the way it bludgeons its points home using the exaggerated methods of social critiques common to such genre pieces as Snowpiercer or Infinity Pool. How effective this will be depends in part on the viewer. Some will appreciate this class satire’s grim portrait of a venal polo-playing billionaire class who explain away their amoral behavior with self-aggrandizing business-speak. Others may thrill to the dark comedy of a serial killer operating so in the open that he’s practically begging to be caught. Either way, the message of Hoesel’s screenplay is blunt: Everyone not at society’s pinnacle is only prey…

Veni Vidi Vici was picked up for distribution so will be getting released later this year. Check out the trailer:

Screening Room: Sundance Review of ‘Love Me’

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The largely animated robot romance Love Me, starring Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, had its premiere at Sundance.

I reviewed for Slant Magazine:

A high-concept vehicle about machines falling in love, Sam and Andy Zuchero’s Love Me aims to be a fable about how the detritus left behind by now-extinct humanity could serve as a misleading guide to how romance should be done. The film starts with an impressive animated opening montage showing the history of Earth in a comedically sped-up fashion; what might be a species-annihilating nuclear war is viewed from a distance as just a flicker of sparks across the planet’s surface. It’s a very grandiose presentation of what’s ultimately a thin sliver of an idea about how social media tropes impede rather than help relationships…

Screening Room: Sundance Film Festival, 2022 Edition

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Once again, the Sundance Film Festival (still showing movies virtually) is spreading cheer in an otherwise gloomy month by giving us a glimpse of what is coming our way in the coming year, cinematically. I covered a few of the movies at this year’s festival for Slant here:

  • When You Finish Saving the World (pictured): Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut is a satire with Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard as monumentally clueless narcissists.
  • We Need to Talk About Cosby: W. Kamau Bell’s four-part docuseries digs into the comedic genius and criminal villainy of Bill Cosby and the toxic tangling of the two.
  • Sharp Stick: The latest comedy from Lena Dunham is about a young woman determined to lose her virginity by starting an affair with her older, married employer.
  • Call Jane: Phyllis Nagy’s drama stars Elizabeth Banks as a late-Sixties Chicago housewife who inadvertently becomes part of an underground abortion operation run by activist Sigourney Weaver.
  • 892: A true-life hostage drama starring John Boyega as an Iraq War veteran who threatens to set off a bomb in a bank if his demands against the VA are not met.

Screening Room: ‘The Big Sick’

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For The Big Sick, comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his wife Emily V. Gordon turned the story of their on-off romance and the intensive-care crisis that brought them back together, into probably the best romantic comedy of the summer.

The Big Sick is playing now in limited release and expanding soon around the country. My review is at PopMatters:

At the story’s beginning, Kumail is a typical sort for a Judd Apatow-produced romantic comedy. A standup comic who spends most of his time in career anxiety with his comic buddies, Kumail is hoping for the big break and making ends meet as an Uber driver. This is all highly upsetting to his parents. For them, as one of Kumail’s better gags in the movie goes, the hierarchy of employment for a good Pakistani son runs in descending order: doctor, engineer, lawyer, “hundreds of jobs, ISIS”, and then comedian…

Here’s the trailer:

New in Theaters: ‘The Square’

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Khalid Abdalla (star of 'The Kite Runner') and Ahmad Hassan, two of the Tahrir Square activists profiled in 'The Square'
Khalid Abdalla (star of ‘The Kite Runner’) and Ahmad Hassan, two of the Tahrir Square activists profiled in ‘The Square’

thesquare-poster1Jehane Noujaim’s incandescent documentary about the Tahrir Square revolution first played Sundance back in January; she went back to Egypt to shoot later developments. The version of The Square that just opened in limited release now has a dramatic arc, from the 2011 resignation of Mubarak to this summer’s coup that toppled Morsi. It’s an elegantly put-together and passionate story of the tragedy of revolutions and the resilience of ideas.

My review is at Film Journal International:

The film is thick with dense collages of tear gas, gunfire, and seas of people leaping and shouting in unison. But it also cuts away to zoom in on a few of these people who would otherwise just be specks in a pointillist portrait. What Noujami has captured is not just a protest, but a diagnostic of the different emotional and political struggles which protesters like Khalid, Ahmed and Magdy are having in the street or on the phone because they don’t live in a country where those arguments can yet be honestly had at the ballot box. 

The trailer is here:

 

Now Playing: ‘Fruitvale Station’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New1 Comment

Ariana Neal and Michael B. Jordan in 'Fruitvale Station'
Ariana Neal and Michael B. Jordan in ‘Fruitvale Station’

fruitvalestation-posterNearly every year there’s a scrappy indie flick that comes into the Sundance Film Festival and blows everyone away. All too often, though, once the film itself comes down from the high mountain air, it seems markedly less unique. Fortunately, with Ryan Coogler’s devastating Fruitvale Station, that is not the case. It plays just as well in a multiplex alongside The Wolverine as it does in the rarefied festival air.

My full review is at Film Racket; here’s part:

Nothing about the 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant makes sense. For his keen, impassioned debut, writer/director Ryan Coogler avoids one of the most common mistakes seen in based-on-a-true-story movies, he doesn’t try to make it make sense. It shouldn’t, because one version of what actually happened is the first thing shown in the film. A grainy cellphone video taken from the open door of a BART train car paused at an Oakland station shows a few young black men being held down by a few white transit police; there’s a minor-looking scuffle and then a shot goes off. The momentum of those shaky images,  is stuttering and randomized. When the tragic moment happens, it doesn’t feel right to happen like that. Not yet…

You can watch the trailer here: