One Plus One/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Violation (2021)
This review contains spoilers, so consider this fair warning. Amputation and dismemberment seem to have been a running theme throughout the 2021 Sundance Film Festival selections, and “Violation” certainly has its share. Yet, this rape revenge flick is the only offering (that this reviewer is aware of) at the Sundance virtual screening portal that requires age verification, presumably for prominently featuring a fully erect penis.
Tamás Dobos
MOVIE REVIEW
Natural Light (2021)
“Natural Light,” set during WWII, often feels like classic awards bait. Its visual and thematic austerity is stark. The film appears to center on the moral awakening of Isvván Semetka (Ferenc Szabó), a photographer turned commander of the Hungarian force occupying Soviet territories – though it’s hard to tell from his perpetual stoicism.
Jeonwonsa Film Co.Production
MOVIE REVIEW
Introduction (2021)
So what’s the Korean Woody Allen to do when his American counterpart now resides on the blacklist? If “Introduction” is any indication, Hong Sang-soo is in no hurry to distance himself from the association even if it now conjures up the alleged predator of adopted daughters rather than the chronicler of the Central Park West bourgeoisie. “Introduction” isn’t just Allenesque, it’s monochromatic Allenesque – à la “Manhattan,” “Stardust Memories,” “Zelig,” “Broadway Danny Rose,” “Shadows and Fog,” “Celebrity” et al. (See also: “The Day After,” “Grass” and “Hotel by the River.”) Continue if you want to be spoiled.
Neopa/Fictive
MOVIE REVIEW
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021)
What makes “Asako I & II” so immensely captivating is how its characters make spur-of-the-moment choices that generate life-altering reverberations. For his follow-up, writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has seemingly taken a figurative page from the book of Tomoka Shibasaki, from whose novel “Asako I & II” is adapted. Winner of the Silver Bear at the 71st Berlinale, Mr. Hamaguchi’s “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” is a triptych of short films continuing the exploration of fate, impulse and doppelgängers that Ms. Shibasaki commenced. Except in these tales the rash decisions are triggered by anger or longing, which only make them truer to life.
Silviu Ghetie/Micro Film 2021
MOVIE REVIEW
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021)
Winner of the Golden Bear at the 71st Berlinale, “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” can best be described as a cinematic angry rant, complete with formalist structure, confrontational graphic images and subversive antiestablishment views reminiscent of “I Stand Alone.” Yet the near juvenile glee on display makes Romanian writer-director Radu Jude more comparable to Lars von Trier than to Gaspar Noé.
Eunsoo Cho/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
I Was a Simple Man (2021)
Writer-director Christopher Makoto Yogi’s “I Was a Simple Man” is not exactly a work of startling originality. The way it mythicizes Oahu, Hawaii, as a place unspoiled by time and modernity is not unlike Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s depiction of Thailand in “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.” The two films share earthy scenery, clairvoyant characters and superstitious rituals, but “I Was a Simple Man” elides that lost-in-translation pastiche symptomatic of Mr. Weerasethakul’s neo-Orientalism.
Sean Havey/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Homeroom (2021)
In between classes, endless scrolling on smartphones, posing for Instagram and rising to TikTok challenges, students at Oakland High School in California undertook an extra dose of the real world compared with most their age: police brutality. The school district employed its own police department and endowed it with an absurd $6 million budget. Officers apparently thought earning their keep involved occasionally visiting excessive force on their charges.
Student leadership pushed for the elimination of school police and the diversion of funds to educational and social ends threatened by budgetary cuts, but their efforts consistently hit the brick wall of adult members on the school board. Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 further fueled the students’ cause, filmmaker Peter Nicks suggests in the documentary “Homeroom,” though he never quite connects those dots.
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Censor (2021)
The more inspired expository stuff from director-co-writer Prano Bailey-Bond’s ode to 1980s horror, “Censor,” has a sense of humor about it. The title sequence is like the gory companion to the kissing reel from “Cinema Paradiso”: a montage assembled from clips supposedly excised due to censorship. It’s almost put together on a dare to see if anything will survive the notoriously prudish B.B.F.C. There’s also a bit of deadpan comedy in the workaday life of the film’s heroine, Enid (Niamh Algar), as she and colleagues matter-of-factly describe in minute detail the unpleasantries they witness as film censors, presumably in 1980s England.
Jim McHugh/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir (2021)
Amy Tan, the original “pick me Asian” – an Asian expert at telling white people what they want to hear – may not have been one intentionally or consciously after all, at least per James Redford’s documentary “Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir.”
Author of bestseller “The Joy Luck Club,” Ms. Tan has inspired generations of pick-me Asians, both within and outside creative fields. But judging from the film, Ms. Tan would be more aptly characterized as a classic, but different, Asian archetype: the narcissist – an uncommonly melodramatic person who wallows in their own victimhood and thrives on the pity and attention they draw from others. They would readily open up about their sufferings to any random stranger who would listen. This is a trait she seems to share with her mother.
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
One for the Road (2021)
Although Thailand boasts a vibrant film scene, an American would never know it. It’s been a full decade since homegrown Thai box-office successes like “The Iron Ladies” and the Tony Jaa chopsocky reached cinemas on these shores. White gatekeeping on the festival circuit ensures that only filmmakers who shamelessly pander to Westerners will be let in, and architects behind the so-called Thai New Wave understand the gambit well.
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