Sundance Institute
No irony intended (perhaps) in a documentary about the imminent environmental collapse of Utah’s Great Salt Lake ecosystem and the significant collateral damage to the livelihood of large numbers of locals, premiering at the last Sundance Film Festival to be held in the state before it voluntarily transplants to Colorado. Abby Ellis’s documentary “The Lake” follows ecologists, biologists and politicians involved in what one newscaster terms “an environmental nuclear bomb,” the drying out of the Great Salt Lake as the climate puts less water into it and the citizens of Utah take more out. The lake now contains 70 percent less water than it used to, an alarming number by any standards. Utah’s is not the only saltwater lake in the world facing potential disaster; but it is the largest and has the most people living near it. And no one has managed to fix any of the others.
Continue reading “Hell or Low Water” »
Tandem Pictures
The publicity material for “Run Amok” describes its subject matter as “thorny,” although it’s the approach to the topic that might make a viewer tense up. That topic is the ongoing plague of U.S. school shootings, and the approach is a deliberate tonal jumble of pathos, sincerity, tragedy and whimsy; something for everyone (to be cross with). But the goal is for a fictional young shooting survivor to speak for herself, once she’s untangled the knot of snakes in her head; to accept that even she may not know how she feels so asking about it all the time might go nowhere. And certainly to point out that solutions to school shootings do not lie inside the schools.
Continue reading “School Daze” »
David Shadrack Smith/Sundance Institute
A tale old as time. Some piece of new technology lets people transmit themselves to the world in ways previously impossible. Diverse groups which have rarely had their voices heard speak up. Some of them are uncouth and unconventional. They resist the capitalist urge, for a while. Pornography becomes a small part and then a big part of the entire effort. Things fall apart, with casualties. Another new technology displaces the first one, and the caravan moves on. All this plays out in the story of New York’s Manhattan Cable Television, 1970s public access broadcasting in which more or less anyone could say more or less anything, taking advantage of compact reel-to-reel videotape technology which to modern eyes is as compact as an aircraft carrier.
Continue reading “Live From New York” »
Eric Branco/Summer 2001 LLC
Josephine Decker’s “Chasing Summer” announces itself as an outlier. For a filmmaker whose work has often been marked by fragmentation, sensory abrasion, and a willful resistance to narrative comfort, this new film feels almost disarmingly straightforward. It unfolds as a recognizable homecoming story, complete with old grudges, unresolved romances, and the uneasy realization that the self one fled is still waiting patiently back where the odyssey began. That air of convention is no accident. It has a great deal to do with the film’s writer and star, Iliza Shlesinger, whose comic instincts pull Ms. Decker toward something cleaner, calmer, and — by her standards — positively classical.
Continue reading “You Can Go Home Again” »
Sundance Institute
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass (2026)
David Wain’s first feature in eight years, “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” arrives as a cheerfully indecorous homecoming — a return to the shaggy, ensemble-driven absurdism that once made his comedies feel like contraband smuggled into multiplexes. A sitcom-bright spoof of Americana that filters “The Wizard of Oz” through celebrity culture, the film is at once junk-drawer eclectic and curiously sincere about the small, stubborn dreams of its heroine.
Continue reading “Somewhere Over the Top” »
Haut et Court – Maipo Film – Versus Production – Good Chaos – RTBF/Sundance Institute
A stark winter landscape in the Norwegian Fjords is the third key player in "Sukkwan Island," in which a father and son set out to spend an entire year together largely isolated from the world, at the father's instigation. It seems that Tom (Swann Arlaud) hopes to strengthen his relationship with teenager, Roy (Woody Norman), after some kind of messy divorce from Roy's mother, Elizabeth (Tuppence Middleton, too briefly). But Tom is twitchy from the start. Psychological cracks are clearly going to split open out in the wilderness.
Continue reading “Winter Kills” »
Mstyslav Chernov/Sundance Institute
2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025)
The documentary “2000 Meters to Andriivka” takes its Sundance Film Festival audience back to the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive against invading Russian forces, an operation with mixed results now recorded in the books and which even at the time seemed likely to turn into grinding costly warfare. That description looks like a light euphemism while watching Mstyslav Chernov’s documentary, built around first-person footage from body-mounted cameras worn by Ukrainian soldiers and by Mr. Chernov, embedded in their brigade and coming under as much fire as the rest of them. The military goal is the strategic village of Andriivka, approached via a dead-straight strip of charred forest between two large and deeply cratered mine fields; not the last time that the film’s visuals have an aura of the fictional about them, the harshest battlefield a production designer could concoct. A Ukrainian soldier himself says it’s “like another planet.” But this is all humans at work.
Continue reading “Under Fire” »
Sundance Film Festival
No one in "André is an Idiot" actually quotes the eminent philosopher James T. Kirk and says that how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life; but the ethos of Tony Benna's documentary speaks for itself. Fictional and factual art about facing terminal medical diagnoses and imminent reunion with the cosmos isn't exactly thin on the ground, although the universal sympathies of any nonpsychopathic viewer are pulled out freshly painful every time. The success of the art as art comes down to the nature of the person in the frame. In this case that's extrovert ad executive and loving, if mildly madcap, family man André Ricciardi, whose delay in getting a colonoscopy when warning signs appeared at the age of 52 leads to the discovery of a huge Stage IV colorectal cancer tumor, one that had been lining up his destiny for a while.
Continue reading “Death and Other Details” »
David Bolen/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Thelma (2024)
Writer-director Josh Margolin has taken direct inspiration from the “Mission: Impossible” movies (Tom Cruise is thanked in the credits) to make an action movie starring an elderly woman which does not once patronize her. It takes the dual challenges of being old and caring for the elderly and turns them into riotous action sequences filmed by David Bolen with all the flash of a thriller, and with Simon Astall’s music hitting the same dramatic notes. Climbing two flights of stairs is no small achievement when your body is winding down, so it’s a completely fair comparison, and kind of surprising no one has done this before. This is also the first starring role of June Squibb’s film career, and considering her acting career has lasted over 70 years, better late than never – but oh, what a loss, because she’s wonderful. Funny, devious, charming and with a determination to assert herself that never turns to bitterness, Ms. Squibb’s Thelma is an absolute delight. From the Sundance Film Festival onwards, this will redefine crowd-pleaser.
Continue reading “Easy Prey” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Kneecap (2024)
Look, either you think it’s hilarious that a man shouts a well-known terrorist slogan at the point of orgasm, or you’re not going to enjoy “Kneecap.” But not enjoying this movie would be a big mistake. It is simply the best movie ever made about being young in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and a strong new addition to the canon of movies about disaffected youths finding their voices through rapping about sex and drugs. The fact their language is Irish means the movie, and the real-life band of the same name this is about, is a fresh new take on language preservation and so-called minority culture rights. It is the first ever Irish-language movie shown at the Sundance Film Festival, and made with a screaming sense of humor that is, from start to finish, a joy.
Continue reading “Acting the Maggot” »
