Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Exhibiting Forgiveness (2024)
It’s not so much that this movie has strange ideas about the healing power of art. It’s that it has strange ideas about the healing power of forgiveness. Here forgiveness is not a gift you give yourself. Instead it’s something other people have the right to, without apology or doing the work to set things right. This strange sense of entitlement is the hook on which hangs a difficult family history and how it has shaped an artist. So the choice of the word “exhibit” in the title is appropriate: it’s only a feeling of the real thing.
Continue reading “Ghost From the Past” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Krazy House (2024)
Many European artists – Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, to name a couple – have very skewed ideas about what defines Americana, deduced exclusively from our pop culture exports. The Dutch filmmaking duo Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil is yet another example. “Krazy House,” premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, can best be described as “Funny Games” reimagined as a sitcom.
Continue reading “Losing My Religion” »
A24
MOVIE REVIEW
A Different Man (2024)
“A Different Man” reunites filmmaker Aaron Schimberg with his “Chained for Life” leading man, Adam Pearson. If you think deeply about it, the new film, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, is actually incredibly sweet in its attempt to normalize the actor’s deformity caused by neurofibromatosis type 1. For the uninitiated, though, it’s more like some mashup of “Face/Off,” “The Elephant Man” and “Beauty and the Beast.” It may look like body horror, but it’s a comedy . . . maybe?
Continue reading “About Face” »
Anna Kooris/A24
MOVIE REVIEW
Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
“Saint Maud” auteur Rose Glass returns with something more deliberately A24-y, a gonzo pulp fully in the mode of ’70s grindhouse and its ’90s Quentin Tarantino-led renaissance. Ms. Glass disclosed at the Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Love Lies Bleeding” that she originally set it in Scotland, but the story just makes much more sense in the States. She ain’t wrong. This toxic mix of unhinged bloodlust and sleazy softcore is basically cinematic apple pie.
Continue reading “Attack of the Killer Lesbians” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Presence (2024)
Perhaps the only filmmaker who has successfully bounced between commercial and indie careers, Steven Soderbergh returns to Sundance Film Festival, where his breakout arrived via 1989’s “sex, lies, and videotape,” with another lean and mean production perfectly appropriate for the annual Park City event. You can almost venture to guess that principal photography for “Presence” took something like 11 days; and I don’t mean this in a bad way.
Continue reading “A Haunted House” »
Tobin Yelland/Focus Features
MOVIE REVIEW
The American Society of Magical Negroes (2024)
Spotlighted by Spike Lee in the early aughts, Magical Negro is a well-worn narrative trope involving Black supporting characters whose entire raison d’être is to selflessly serve the white protagonists. We’ve been told this story time and again, in popular movies such as “The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Green Mile,” “The Legend of Bagger Vance” and “Green Book,” to name a few. While now well-known and widely accepted in cinema studies, the academic jargon still makes many a white editor uncomfortable and prone to excise it almost instinctively as if it’s unfit for polite conversation. Unfortunately, this time they won’t be able to cop out and strike it from the title of “The American Society of Magical Negroes.”
Continue reading “The Help” »
Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Freaky Tales (2024)
Named after a Too $hort track from his 1987 album, “Born to Mack,” “Freaky Tales” is a quadriptych chock full of interconnected characters – among them, a fictionalized Too $hort played by the rapper Symba and Too $hort himself narrating and making a cameo as a cop whose yen for rocky road ice cream is unfulfilled. The film, from Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden and premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, isn’t Too $hort’s “Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” however.
Continue reading “Once Upon a Time in Oakland” »
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Eileen (2023)
While the charming animated movie “Inside Out” made it plain that disgust is one of the core emotions necessary for our survival, it’s also the one people enjoy the least. Therefore a movie about disgust must find a way to portray disgusting things in such a way that audiences are not disgusted themselves. It’s a very, very fine line to walk, and therefore something of an achievement that “Eileen’s” director William Oldroyd does it so well, and no doubt why “Eileen” screened at the Sundance Film Festival. But the human instinct to sniff one’s fingers after masturbating is not to be encouraged.
Continue reading “Accessory to Crime” »
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
The Fishbowl (2025)
Noelia (Isel Rodríguez) is a filmmaker in her early 30s living in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She has a colostomy bag and a boyfriend named Jorge (Maximiliano Rivas), whose cloying concern for her is more annoying than the colostomy bag. A fun night celebrating a friend’s birthday involves Jorge serenading Noelia before the entire bar, but also giving her an unpleasant lecture about her behaviors on the way home. This means when Noelia and Jorge get some further news about her health, she shuts him out completely. Instead she gets on the ferry and goes home to her mother, Flora (Magali Carrasquillo), a widow who lives on an island called Vieques and spends her free time clearing the local beaches of land mines the American military left behind. She wears a homemade suit for protection, so it’s fine. Besides, nobody else wants to do it; and somebody has to.
Continue reading “Home Care” »
A24
MOVIE REVIEW
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023)
History wraps around itself while you're watching "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," setting the life of one person against those of her parents, grandparents, sister and her own child. Different time periods in the same Mississippi setting mesh together, not urgently for impact but languidly for poetry, events crossing across each other like the wandering tuning of an old radio. Dialogue is sparse but the soundtrack is dense with the noise of rain, insects, running water, while the images are lengthy shots of hands, vegetation and mud. A story about one young rural mother builds up incrementally, a sad story; but the film roots her so firmly into the landscape that she and her pain might be aspects of some larger, more spiritual thing.
Continue reading “Down to Earth” »