Festivals: Sundance Videos
IN A VIOLENT NATURE Official Trailer: Chris Nash's "Genre-Redefining Zombie-Slasher" is Coming For You
By all accounts In A Violent Nature, the feature film debut from writer/director Chris Nash, is a game changer, a single film that revolutionizes the slasher genre. One of the buzziest titles to come out of Sundance this year we're...
Sundance 2024 Review: HIT MAN, Richard Linklater Directs Glen Powell in a Morally Relativistic Comedy-Drama
To hear Glen Powell tell the story, he decided to become an actor and writer on Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation. It wasn’t his first or second role. It was his third. A not particularly significant part, it was more...
Sundance 2024 Review: THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES, Surface-Deep Satire Flounders on Rom-Com Shores
Filmmaker Spike Lee generally gets credit for inserting the “magical negro” phrase into pop culture more than two decades ago, but the idea itself dates back decades, if not longer. Coined to reflect the tradition in fiction or film of...
Sundance 2024 Review: BRIEF HISTORY OF A FAMILY, Trenchant, Perceptive Character Study
The outsized demands inherent in familial expectations can weigh heavily on children. It’s all the heavier when those expectations fall on the shoulders of a child born and raised without siblings. That’s compounded even further when authoritarian governments strictly limit...
KRAZY HOUSE Teaser: Nick Frost And Alicia Silverstone Star in Comedy Horror From NEW KIDS Duo
Cheese and rats, it's the teaser trailer for Krazy House, the upcoming comedy horror from Steffen Haars and Flip Van der Kuil. They are, of course, the writers and directors of our favorite and irreverant Dutch comedies New Kids Turbo...
IFSN Advocate Award 2023: Annual Award Goes to D. Smith's KOKOMO CITY
Indie Film Site Network (IFSN) has announed this year's winner of the 2023 Indie Film Site Network Advocate Award. D. Smith's directorial debut the documentary Kokomo City has been chosen as this year's recepiant. Four Black transgender sex workers explore...
Friday One Sheet: ROTTING IN THE SUN
Sex and death. Eros and Thanatos. A corpse with an erection being consumed on a beach. The latest queer comedy from Sebastián Silva (director of the criminally underrated Magic Magic) gets this lovely hand painted poster (if you zoom in...
MY ANIMAL Trailer: Sundance Lycanthropy Tale in Theaters And Digital Next Month
Bobbi Salvör Menuez (Euphoria) and Amandla Stenberg (Bodies Bodies Bodies) ignite in this genre-bending supernatural love story. Tormented by a hidden family curse, Heather is forced to live a secluded life on the outskirts of a small town. When she...
Sundance 2023 Review: CASSANDRO Wrestles With Macho Prejudices
Inspired by a true story, director Roger Ross Williams' fiction debut follows an underdog who broke traditions in lucha libre and became a queer icon.
Sundance 2023 Review: AUM: THE CULT AT THE END OF THE WORLD Offers Anatomy of Terror
Chiaki Yanagimoto and Ben Braun's documentary goes behind the scenes of the 1995 Sarin gas attack in a Tokyo subway.
Sundance 2023 Review: THEATER CAMP, Feel-Good, Hilarious Comedy
The summer mockumentary about a Gen Z musical camp, spread between 'Wet Hot American Summer' and 'What We Do in the Shadows,' brims with a refreshing community vibe.
Sundance 2023 Review: MAMI WATA, West African Folktale Stuns, Mesmerizes
In West African folklore, Mami Wata (“Mother Water”) represents a water-based deity of relatively recent vintage to the continent. Traditionally a life-giver and life-bringer, Mami Wata isn’t without her ambiguities, however. She can take as well as give in equal...
Sundance 2023 Review: KING COAL, Iluminating, Insightful Cine-Essay
Despite a total population just one-fifth of New York City, West Virginia, the 12th-least populous state in the Union and the 10th by land mass, holds a disproportionate place in the collective political, social, and cultural imagination in the United...
Sundance 2023 Review: ANIMALIA, Abstract, Metaphysical Sci-Fi Drama
For writer-director Sofia Alaoui, winning the Short Film Grand Jury Prize for Qu’importe si les bêtes meurent (So What If the Goats Die) at the Sundance Film Festival and the Best Short Film at the César Awards three years ago...
Sundance 2023 Review: DIVINITY, Provocative, Absurdist Lo-Fi Sci-Fi
There’s a fine line between ambition and pretension. It’s a line writer-director Eddie Alcazar (The Vandal, Perfect, Fuckkkyouuu) repeatedly skirts in his first feature-length film, Divinity, an absurdist, po-faced, lo-fi sci-fi film shot in gloriously luminous, numinous black-and-white. As a...
Sundance 2023 Review: IN MY MOTHER'S SKIN, Filipino Folk Horror Enthralls and Disturbs in Equal Measure
The 400-year-old spectre of imperialism, colonialism, and occupation (Spanish, American, and Japanese) hovers above Filipino filmmaker Kenneth Dagatan's (Ma) second, feature-length film, In My Mother’s Skin. Set during the waning days of World War II, with the Japanese army in...
Sundance 2023 Review: JOYLAND, Pakistan's Groundbreaking Queer Love Story
Writer-director Sam Sadiq’s feature-length debut, Joyland, is a film of firsts. It's the first Pakistani film to debut at Cannes (last year), where it won the Un Certain Regard and Queer Palm awards; the first Pakistani film to be shortlisted...
Sundance 2023 Review: MAMACRUZ, Spanish Character Study Impresses, Moves, Celebrates
In 1975, Francisco Franco, the right-wing dictator who ruled Spain for almost four decades, died after a lengthy battle with his own mortality, leaving his designated successor, Juan Carlos I, to presumably continue his fascist policies, centered on three overriding...
Sundance 2023 Review: SORCERY, Essential Chilean Anti-Colonialist Narrative
Chiloé Island lies off the southwestern coast of Chile. It’s a lush, verdant island, filled with rolling hills, forests, and farmland. Over millennia, it’s been home first to indigenous people, chief among them the Huilliche, and then, like most of...
Sundance 2023 Review: LA PECERA (THE FISHBOWL), Penetrating Exploration of Terminal Illness
The history of Puerto Rico is the history of colonialism. The history of Vieques, an island off the coast of Puerto Rico, is the history of American imperialism. During World War II, the United States forcibly expropriated most of the...