Fighting With My Family is a shamelessly formulaic sponsored post of a crowd-pleaser that’s also, in its best moments, a genuinely stirring celebration of chase-your-dreams moxie. It presents the Cinderella (origin) story of professional wrestler Paige with just enough scrappy naturalism—enough English working-class…
Most sequels are time warps: It’s the audience that gets stuck in a loop, experiencing the same premise all over again. So it should come as no shock that Happy Death Day 2U finds a way to zap sorority girl Tree (Jessica Rothe) right back into the live-die-repeat cycle she escaped at the end of 2017’s horror-comedy…
It takes guts, making a basketball movie with no basketball. Is there irony, too, in keeping players on the sideline of a story about returning power to the players? Steven Soderbergh has done both with his new low-fi Netflix drama High Flying Bird, which is interested in juking of a different sort—in backroom…
No one would ever confuse the dark dreamscapes of David Lynch for the droll dollhouse comedies of Wes Anderson. But the two filmmakers do have one thing in common: Better than most of their contemporaries, they understand the power of a good music cue.
There’s a nifty throwaway feature in Capcom’s brand-new remake of the survival-horror classic Resident Evil 2. At any point throughout the campaign, you can go to the settings menu and toggle to the original game’s audio. Not the exact same audio, of course—there’s no way to make the monsters sound like they did in…
Every public Sundance screening begins with a short recap of the previous day’s festivities: red-carpet sound bytes, funny or inspirational remarks from Q&As, brief glimpses of the live special events the festival hosts on historic, bustling Main Street. (Oh look, it’s Feist playing some downbeat acoustic song… until…
This morning was supposed to be my last at Sundance, but the weather had other ideas. Not the weather here in Park City, mind—that’s been unseasonably warm and pleasant, unblemished by the kind of snowstorms that often make getting around the mountain town a challenge. But back in Chicago, where wind temperatures are…
Every January, Park City plays host to a film festival for truly independent cinema. As you can probably guess, I’m not talking about Sundance, which tends to operate as much like another gear of the Hollywood machine as any kind of showcase for what’s happening on the fringe of American moviemaking. No, for the…
Watch a random few minutes from any of his movies and it becomes obvious that Dan Gilroy loves the cinema of the 1970s. It’s an obsession baked into the rhythm and downbeat trajectory of his work. Increasingly, though, one has to wonder: Have all of his insights been yanked from 40 years ago, too? Nightcrawler,…
There are people who come to Sundance just for the chance to freak out at the sight of a movie star. (“Fan” is the charitable word to describe these folks. “Unpaid paparazzi “ would do the trick, too.) Movie stars, by contrast, sometimes come to the festival to unleash their inner freak—to subvert their public image,…
One thing I’ve learned in my years covering Sundance is that when a programmer gets up on stage and tells an audience that the movie they’re about to watch is “tough” or “not for the faint of heart,” you take them dead seriously. A few years ago, someone prefaced a screening of The Eyes Of My Mother, a spirited…
Big news rumbled like an avalanche across the peaks and valleys of Park City, Utah yesterday afternoon. Robert Redford, beaming public face of the Sundance Film Festival, would be stepping away from the event he founded in 1978 and which has, for 35 of the years that have passed since, shared the name of his most…
Nothing is ever as it seems in film noir, a genre built on hidden motives and delayed revelations. Serenity, a preposterous tropical-island thriller from writer-director Steven Knight, takes that principle to an absurd new extreme. To even describe the film as noir is to make oneself an accomplice to its deception.…
When Debra Granik’s touching and truthful Leave No Trace premiered at the Sundance Film Festival one year ago today, a few writers and media outlets began loudly asking a leading question: Was Thomasin McKenzie, the film’s largely unknown 17-year-old star, “the next Jennifer Lawrence?” It was a reductive and imperfect…
The first time Samuel L. Jackson appears in Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan’s majestically moody turn-of-the-century spin on the superhero origin story, he’s waxing rhapsodic about comic books, with all the command Jules Winnfield reserved for imaginary Bible verses. Comics are real art, and not just for kids,…
Replicas, the astonishingly inept new Keanu Reeves vehicle, plays less like a science-fiction thriller than some malfunctioning computer’s unconvincing approximation of one. If you woke up in a glitching simulation, this janky garbage would be projected on every screen, possibly under the title Human Movie. One could…
