The Sundance Film Festival shared details about the shape of its upcoming 2021 edition, providing for the first time how the Festival will take place and where. Suffice to say, the online expression of the Festival will be unique, what we have here is a primarily virtual festival via an online platform, which was designed and custom-built. Feature films will each make their premiere at a set start time followed by a live Q&A. There will also be in-person screenings in over 28 U.S. States (as health and safety protocols permit) through a network of partnerships in arthouse communities.
Read more‘To The Stars’ Is A Beautiful, But Familiar, Coming Of Age Tale [Review]
The bible belt of early 1960s rural Oklahoma wasn’t a great time and place in America for outsiders. And this god-fearing country is certainly no place for two girls that may be slowly falling in love and calling too much public attention to all the time they’re spending together. Director Martha Stephens (co-director of 2014 Sundance film “Land Ho!” with Aaron Katz) adapts Shannon Bradley-Colleary‘s screenplay on intolerance and class-warfare in pre-sexual revolution America into an artfully visual feast, but one that unfortunately plods along at an uneven pace into heavy-handedness as the drama intensifies. It’s a missed opportunity for something more poignant.
Read more‘The Report' is a Slowburn Political Thriller Driven By an Excellent Adam Driver Performance [Review]
When Senate staffer Daniel Jones (Adam Driver) was assigned to lead an investigation into the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program he did not know it would become his own personal "heart of darkness". In a way, Jones' painstaking analyzing of the extensive evidence at hand, his report turned out to be 6000 pages, revealed just how much our civil liberties were stripped by the Bush administration and, consequentially, the Obama administration, spearheaded by, then CIA director. John Brennan (Ted Levine).
Read more‘Memory: The Origins of Alien’ Is A Fascinating Deep Dive Into A Sci-Fi/Horror Classic [Review]
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Ridley Scott‘s “Alien,” a cinematic behemoth that influenced the next four decades of science fiction and horror. And because of this milestone, many fan tributes will pour in, as will countless opinion pieces detailing its lasting impact. That being said, one cannot see a more thorough and invigorating dissection of the classic being released than “Memory: The Origins of Alien,” Alexandre O. Philippe’s feature-length analysis of the DNA that molded “Alien” into the horror masterpiece that it is known as today.
‘Corporate Animals’: Demi Moore’s Unfunny Performance Hinders This Wild Cannibal Office Horror-Comedy [Review]
Many attempt to mix the outwardly-delicious peanut butter and chocolate tone of comedy and horror, and there are many good ones—“Shaun of the Dead” “Cabin In The Woods,” “Get Out,” the “Evil Dead” films, etc.— but it’s actually a deceptively tricky genre hybrid to get right. For all the classics, much like horror, there’s a lot of cheap, garish junk that gets churned out each year that hurts the overall quality score.
Read more‘Official Secrets’: Keira Knightley Can’t Save Gavin Hood’s Political Whistleblower Thriller [Review]
[Originally written at the Sundance Film Festival in January. “Official Secrets” is being released in theaters this Friday]
Read more‘David Crosby: Remember My Name’ Is A Soulful & Intimate Portrait Of Regret [Review]
Rock documentaries generally skew towards humanizing musical icons and paint portraits of overcoming personal adversity. That’s just the kind of way they lean, complete with a rise and fall and redemption arcs. But the soulful and affecting “David Crosby: Remember My Name” is special nonetheless, managing to break through those tropes as it chronicles a similar architecture of ups and downs, successes and tragedies. Directed by A.J. Eaton, with the help of producer Cameron Crowe, who acts as Crosby’s interlocutor throughout, it’s almost impossible to not be taken by this brutally honest and emotionally vulnerable film about a famous musical icon, who’s also just a man who’s beginning to contemplate his last act in life. It’s moving stuff and regardless of whether you’re a fan or not, chances are this winning doc will hit you hard.
Read more‘The Farewell’: Awkwafina Shines In A Resonant Happy/Sad Tale Of Family Love & Loss [Review]
I am re-posting my Sundance review of Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell” because of its impending theatrical release this coming Friday. Also, look for an interview with Wang to be posted later this week — she has truly directed one of the very best movies you will see this summer.
Read moreJohn Cooper To Step Down as Sundance Head in 2020
I had heard more than a few months ago that John Cooper was going to step down as head director of the Sundance Film Festival. It was, however, only officially announced today that, after just 10 years on the job, Cooper will move into a newly-created “emeritus director” role after the 2020 edition of the festival next January.
Read more‘Knock Down the House’: Love Her or Not, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Doc Will Fire You Up [Review]
Young, female, brown, carrying oh-so-terrifying socialist ideals of equality for the underrepresented, and not afraid to speak her mind loudly, U.S. House of Representatives politician and activist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez currently has the Washington D.C. establishment quaking in their boots. Laugh if you want to, but there’s absolutely a reason a brand new, relatively inexperienced 29-year-old congresswoman—the youngest woman ever to serve in the United States—has found herself in the crosshairs of Fox News, The Daily Caller, and dozens of alt-right conservative voices. She’s absolutely dangerous to them because she represents a wakeup call to America and a voice of change they desperately want to suppress.
Read moreIn ‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile' the Devil is the Charmer [Review]
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger and late collaborator Bruce Sinofsky were always interested in making films about the way our justice, or injustice, system works; the perpetrators, the victims, the fascination was there seeped into every frame of “Brother’s Keeper” and “Paradise Lost.” However, in “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile,” Berlinger decides to turn his camera towards the charismatic killer and the way evil can easily be shaded by charm.
Read more“Leaving Neverland" Feels More Like an Opportunistic Hit-Piece Rather Than a Documentary [Review]
I can “review” HBO’s upcoming “Leaving Neverland” or just give an opinionated schema of Michael Jackson and his history of sexual abuse allegations towards underaged teenage boys. I’ll try to do both.
Read more“Velvet Buzzsaw" Is a Pathetic Horror-Satire of the L.A. Art World [Review]
I had totally forgotten that Dan Gilory’s “Velvet Buzzsaw” was released on Netflix until I scrolled through the streaming giant’s service this past week. I had seen it at its world premiere on January 27th at the Sundance Film Festival.
Read more“Hala" is a coming-of-age drama that feels unique and vital [Sundance Review]
A film based on women trying to break through the restrictive barriers of their parent’s religious upbringing is nothing new. However, Minhal Baig‘s “Hala” is unique because it tackles a gifted, hijab-wearing, skateboarding Pakistani (Geraldine Viswanathan) student who tries to navigate both her duties as a Muslim and her academic social life with poetic grace. The complications that arise in Baig’s film can be deemed conventional for this type of film but regardless they feel fresh and, more importantly, authentic because of the way Baig’s camera relates, in such intense ways, to Hala’s on-screen plights. Her sudden and out-of-the-blue romance with Jesse (Jack Kilmer) takes Hala away from the restrictions of her religion, the arranged marriage her father has in mind. And her own parent’s disintegrating relationship, threatened by her dad’s infidelities with a white woman in his office, only makes her life worse. Expanded from Baig’s 2016 similarly titled short film, the American female perspective in “Hala” is unique, bringing a new, much-needed perspective to the coming-of-age genre. Despite being apart from the intense Muslim world our main character lives in, there’s a relatability to her tribulations that hits home. Viswanathan (“Blockers”) proves to be a formidable actress, showcasing a woman trying to take the liberties that come in living as a woman in America and creating her own destiny, free of restrictions. [B/B+]
‘Cold Case Hammarskjöld’ Is An Astonishing Murder Mystery Investigation Doc [Sundance Review]
It’s a cliché, but “more than you bargained for” documentaries are typically the best ones. Those films that feature a filmmaker on an odyssey quest for one piece of truth, but discovers something richer and more profound along the journey. Such is the case with what Mads Brügger‘s astonishing “Cold Case Hammarskjöld,” about an investigation into a mysterious murder that strikes a vein and the blood of discovery comes gushing. What begins as a look into a plane crash, and the consequent death of United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld in the early 1960s, quickly turns into something much more transfixing: the confirmation of a conspiracy theory that has existed for more than five decades.
‘Midnight Family' is A Thriller About Mexican Ambulances That Happens to Be Non-Fiction [Sundance Review]
Despite a population of close to 9 million, Mexico City’s government operates only 45 emergency ambulances. This shortage crisis has resulted in private paramedics becoming first responders to the critically injured. One of them is the Ochoas family, zigzagging through high-speed ambulance rides to care for the critically injured. Despite being unregistered, they are the underground lifeline for many. At first, you don’t know if what you’re watching is fiction or non-fiction. The masterful cinema vérité camerawork in Luke Lorentzen’s “Midnight Family” has a knack for sucking us into after-hours Mexico City and the fractured health care system at its disposal. From local competition to police bribes to patient’s unwillingness to pay their bills, the Ochoas have to navigate through all of that to make ends meet, then there’s the ethically questionable practice of making money off dying poor patients. This 81-minute masterpiece will change the way you look at documentaries forever; its style reads like an action movie, its themes like a socio-political drama, and, yet, it still is very much a work of non-fiction, with a camera always exactly positioned to capture a society on the brink of moral collapse. [A]
“Late Night" Tackles Feminism In Commercially Friendly Ways [Sundance Review]
The idea that we can modernize familiar narrative tropes is something that Hollywood always strives in achieving. After all, why change a formula that has been working so well, and making money, on audiences since the beginning of time when you could just freshen it up for contemporary audiences, whose sensibilities, let’s be frank haven’t changed all that much. Please keep in mind that in the millions of years the homosapien has lived on this planet, their DNA has barely changed, nor has their way of responding to triggers which prompt the usual emotional reactions.
Read more‘Last Black Man In San Francisco' Can't Overcome Its Thin Drama, Even With Impressive Visual Style [Review]
Aesthetics and substance are two entirely different things in cinema. You could have a film that is bracingly inventive in its visual approach but falls flat in the narrative drama. Ditto the reverse, a visually flat film with a well-realized narrative. The latter is usually worth a recommendation, but the former can be problematic, even when you have a film as visually accomplished as Joe Talbot’s “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.”
Read more‘Luce’: Julias Onah’s Powerfully Constructed Psychodrama Of Race & Social Politics Is Brilliantly Tense [Sundance Review]
In two short years, America, has turned race, privilege, and class into incendiary topics while amplifying intolerance, and Julias Onah‘s powerfully constructed “Luce,” mixes all these socio-political subjects into a provocative Molotov cocktail that shatters, burns and leaves no easy answers.
A Few Thoughts on Sundance 2019
Before I reveal my best of the fest I need to mention the elephant in the room …
Throughout the fest I wanted journalists to be honest with me about why they thought this year's program was lackluster, at least in terms of the narrative features. Amost all of them mentioned the fact that Sundance's militant and adamant stance on inclusivity was to blame. Of course, you won't get these critics admitting that on print, but many personally confessed that was a problem.
Read more
BREAKING: Steven Soderbergh has stepped in to finish "The Batman Part II" as Matt Reeves remains away due to family reasons. This is a beautiful gesture, if you ask me: a filmmaker helping out a fellow filmmaker.