Cusp, 2021.Directed by Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt.SYNOPSIS:In a Texas military town, three teenage girls confront the dark corners of adolescence at the end of a fever dream summer.The first sight in Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt’s documentary Cusp couldn’t more literally visualise its central thematic, observing two young girls hanging out on a swing while two […]
2021 Sundance Film Festival Review – Life in a Day 2020
Life in a Day 2020, 2021.Directed by Kevin Macdonald.SYNOPSIS:Ten years after 2011’s Life in a Day, award-winning director Kevin Macdonald returns to present the story of another day on Earth: July 25, 2020.Of all the movies about the COVID-19 pandemic released as of late – from exploitative speculative thrillers to a rom-com heist film starring Anne […]
2021 Sundance Film Festival Review – Misha and the Wolves
Misha and the Wolves, 2021.Directed by Sam Hobkinson.SYNOPSIS:A woman’s Holocaust memoir takes the world by storm, but a fallout with her publisher-turned-detective reveals her story as an audacious deception created to hide a darker truth.Sam Hobkinson’s fascinating documentary Misha and the Wolves turns the notion of the “stranger-than-fiction” story on its head, focusing on the fraudulent particulars […]
2021 Sundance Film Festival Review – Prisoners of the Ghostland
Prisoners of the Ghostland, 2021.Directed by Sion Sono. Starring Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella, Nick Cassavetes, Bill Moseley, Tak Sakaguchi, and Yuzuka Nakaya.SYNOPSIS:A notorious criminal must break an evil curse in order to rescue an abducted girl who has mysteriously disappeared.The long-awaited pairing of Nicolas Cage and filmmaker Sion Sono has naturally invited stratospheric expectations from their […]
2021 Sundance Film Festival Review – The Blazing World
The Blazing World, 2021.Co-written and directed by Carlson Young. Starring Udo Kier, Carlson Young, Dermot Mulroney, Vinessa Shaw, John Karna, and Soko.SYNOPSIS:Decades after the accidental drowning of her twin sister, a self-destructive young woman returns to her family home, finding herself drawn to an alternate dimension where her sister may still be alive.Multi-hyphenate writer-director-actress Carlson […]
2021 Sundance Film Festival Review – Taming the Garden
Taming the Garden, 2021.Written and directed by Salomé Jashi.SYNOPSIS:Documentary follows trees that are transported, at great expense and inconvenience, from the coast of the Republic of Georgia to the private garden of that country’s former prime minister.Documentarian Salomé Jashi captures environmental disarray in a singularly startling – if extremely methodical – manner in her new film […]
Sundance film Jockey lands at Sony Pictures Classics ahead of its premiere
One day before its premiere during the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, Jockey has found a home with Sony Pictures Classics announcing it has acquired all worldwide rights. From director Clint Bentley, Jockey stars Clifton Collins Jr. as an aging jockey on one last run for a championship. Out of nowhere, a young jockey claiming to […]
2021 Sundance Film Festival Review – A Glitch in the Matrix
Glitch in the Matrix, 2020.Directed by Rodney Ascher.SYNOPSIS:Are we in fact living in a simulation? This is the question postulated, wrestled with, and ultimately argued for through archival footage, compelling interviews with real people shrouded in digital avatars, and a collection of cases from some of our most iconoclastic figures in contemporary culture.Filmmaker Rodney Ascher […]
2021 Sundance Film Festival Review – Mass
Mass, 2021.Written and directed by Fran Kranz. Starring Jason Isaacs, Ann Dowd, Martha Plimpton, and Reed Birney.SYNOPSIS:Years after a tragic shooting, the parents of both the victim and the perpetrator meet face-to-face.In the wake of any tragedy, those affected scramble to make some sense of what’s happened in order to move on with their lives, but […]
2021 Sundance Film Festival Review – Ailey
Ailey, 2021.Directed by Jamila Wignot.SYNOPSIS: A feature-length portrait of the life and work of dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey.“Sometimes your name becomes bigger than yourself.” A single line from Ailey sums up the enigmatic figure at the center of this new documentary. That’s not to say the iconic dancer and choreographer wasn’t essential or bombastic himself, […]
