Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Dual (2022)
"Dual" is a darkly funny entry in doppelganger cinema that could have been titled "Dead Ringers" or "Enemy" or "Black Swan," since there are some limits to the themes that get tackled in this area. But "The Clone Wars" would be ideal. Set in an imprecise nowhere of coniferous forest and pinched English accents – and actually made in Tampere, Finland – the seemingly prosaic society in Riley Stearns's film can offer you a clone of yourself. Useful should you, say, be suffering from a terminal illness and want it to take your place, or if you just fancy committing suicide. The new you can be rustled up in the lab in an hour, like knocking together a casserole.
Continue reading “Body Double” »
Inti Briones/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future (2022)
The natural world rebels under the negligent care of humans in Francisca Alegria's "The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future," a low-key magic realist drama of bereavement and renewal set around and eventually under the waters of Chile's Cruces River. Several anxieties mingle in the plot, although the tone is languid and contemplative and the soundtrack occupied by roughly as much silence as dialogue. But cows do sing and a corpse does walk, in a film whose air of mildly mystic evocation comes from artistic restraint, poetic intent, and perhaps Covid-19 inconvenience.
Continue reading “Herd Ingenuity” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
2nd Chance (2022)
Pacifists and advocates of non-lethal force will feel a headache coming on while watching "2nd Chance," a documentary by Ramin Bahrani telling the rise and fall of the Second Chance company of Michigan and its founder Richard Davis. In the aftermath of a 1970s attempted mugging of Mr. Davis that turned into a back-alley gun battle when he resisted ("I shot two men many times. Unfortunately I was fighting three.") the victim wondered whether a better, lighter bulletproof vest than the flak jackets on the market at the time might be possible. The answer was yes, and a design of woven nylon proved to have real commercial potential. With Second Chance in business as a supplier of vests, Mr. Davis developed a party piece to prove his product's effectiveness, wearing one and then shooting himself in the chest from a range of half an inch.
Continue reading “Bullet Time” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (2022)
Important questions need meaningful debate, which means passionate advocacy, which means polemics that present carefully angled opinions as facts without balance. This isn't the system failing, it might be the system working – as long as the person getting the lecture recognizes it for what it is: One set of views to be thrown into the intellectual mulching machine, grist for the mill between your ears, to be endorsed or modified or just given the boot. Nina Menkes's documentary "Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power" describes the way images of women in film have made direct and very negative alterations to way society (meaning men) treats women in real life, and presents that topic not as a question for debate but as an established fact. Which is entirely its right, even though the correct term in this contested territory must remain "opinion," no matter how firm the assertion in the title.
Continue reading “Sex Education” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Nanny (2022)
Horror fiction can resonate with dark social undercurrents before the same tensions break out in mainstream venues; it's one of the qualities that keep the genre invigorating. Once those tensions are front-page news, though, using them in a horror film can be a Catch 22. Hammer them head-on with blood and violence and the hook just seems familiar; take an oblique sideways angle and you might not be giving the mood of the moment due weight. Nikyatu Jusu's "Nanny" does a little of both, a handsome and well-acted story of immigrant sadness and the spirits duly unleashed, appropriately angry at the indignities foisted onto working class mothers but not able to call down a thunderbolt to smash the situation.
Continue reading “Thicker Than Water” »
Joe Hunting/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
We Met in Virtual Reality (2022)
Scratch a modern innovation and something older, if not ancient, emerges. Virtual Reality was a term before anyone had even made a working transistor and some similar concepts occupied the Ancient Greeks, while no culture on the planet has failed to ponder the wet malfunctioning bag of gunk we have to cart around all the time, and wondered what the life of the mind might get up to if it wasn't held back by the life of the body. V.R. technology brings fresh perspectives on all this, and several positive viewpoints are available inside the online virtual community VRChat shown in Joe Hunting's documentary "We Met in Virtual Reality," perspectives offered up by enthusiastic Anime-inspired avatars of people who are undoubtedly being just as enthusiastic back at home.
Continue reading “Electric Dreams” »
Branko Starcevic/Focus Features
MOVIE REVIEW
You Won’t Be Alone (2022)
Mysterious portents and severe punishments abound in “You Won’t Be Alone,” Goran Stolevski’s feminist fantasy that could be slotted into three different genre boxes without being fully at home in any of them. Entirely set in the lush leafy countryside of 19th Century Macedonia, an enchanted world where at least one of the creatures in local folk tales is constantly lurking just out of sight, the film’s highly affected atmosphere and a languid breathy voice-over narration of knotted esoteric sound-bites will drive some viewers up the wall. So perhaps might its themes, not for their meaning so as much as for the chosen style of presentation, as if multiple different intentions had been squashed through the gene splicer.
Continue reading “Nature or Nurture” »
Ross Ferguson/Number 9 Films
MOVIE REVIEW
Living (2022)
The omnivorous remake culture in which we swim is fueled by many things, but you assume motivations for recycling “Ikiru” did not include mass public recognition of the original property, however high the regard for Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film in cineaste circles. That said, themes of elderly regret and the nature of a life worth living are universally poignant, as the funding proposal to Film4 and its production partners no doubt mentioned. In this case the deciding factor was quite probably the involvement of screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro, whose story “The Remains of the Day” was about the drastic overhaul of Great Britain underway in the 1950s and the benefits of finding something to like about the present; exactly the setting and central concern that Mr. Ishiguro has brought into “Living.”
Continue reading “The Aged Civil Servant” »
Nicola Dove/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
MOVIE REVIEW
No Time to Die (2021)
Danny Boyle could easily have been installed as honorary co-monarch of the United Kingdom by a grateful populace in 2012 after his efforts to bolster the national morale via the Olympics opening ceremony, five minutes of which involved him directing Daniel Craig as James Bond for a quick cutaway gag. Since 2012 the United Kingdom has fallen to bits like a clown car and deep-sea divers continue to hunt for the national morale; but James Bond himself has carried right on, fixed on the course set by "Skyfall" that same fateful year, and which reaches its final destination in "No Time to Die." Mr. Boyle was due to reunite with both Mr. Craig and 007 as director of the new film, before being replaced by Cary Fukunaga. It seems a safe bet that disagreements over that destination played a part.
Continue reading “Spies Like Him” »
Courtesy photo
MOVIE REVIEW
Mad God (2021)
Humanity is moldy on the inside and ugly on the outside, which isn’t news to anyone. Phil Tippett’s “Mad God” has plenty of both mold and ugliness, plus blood and viscera and the contents of the digestive tract, lovingly rendered through the full resources of the animator’s craft. Mr. Tippett’s Stygian odyssey, a film that has been in the works for decades, employs models and some C.G.I. and a smattering of live action; but mainly tells its story through stop-motion animation, the venerable field in which Mr. Tippett’s skills are nonpareil in Hollywood. Propelled by unseen hands, a cast of critters long of fang and foul of breath prowl the circles of “Mad God’s” post-human hell in that slightly jerky over-cranked gait that always conveys the infinite patience of the animator and the fragile mortality of the puppet character, stop-motion’s mix of divinity and disgust. And drollery, since the heavyweight visuals and colossal suffering don’t stop the film cracking a few sprightly jokes from the pit, a distinctly American rather than European damnation.
Continue reading “The God, the Bad and the Ugly” »