Sundance 2025 Review: REBUILDING, Loss, Grief, and Rediscovering Family

Despite the contrarian, anti-science protestations of some on the right, climate change is real. The effects thereof have been and will be felt in the years to come, including extreme weather events, such as the recent devastating wildfires that tore...

Sundance 2025 Review: LOVE, BROOKLYN, Performance-Led Romantic Triangle Engages, Enthralls, Entertains

A catch-all phrase popularized over a decade ago by Meta (formerly Facebook), “It’s complicated,” meant to describe romantic relationships that didn’t fall into one particular category or another, finds its clearest, nearest, and obviously it’s most recent application in director...

Sundance 2025 Review: THE THINGS YOU KILL, A Professor, the Patriarchy, and a Psychological Breakdown

Ali (Ekin Koç), the professor-protagonist in Iranian-born, Canada-residing writer-director Alireza Khatami’s (Terrestrial Verses, Oblivion Verses) perception- and consciousness-bending film, The Things You Kill, suffers from a debilitating existential/spiritual crisis.   After returning to Turkey after more than a decade in...

Sundance 2025 Review: OMAHA, Poignant Character- and Performance-Driven Family Drama

For the disheveled, unnamed father (John Magaro, September 5, Past Lives, First Cow) in first-time feature-length director Cole Webley and writer Robert Machoian’s (The Killing of Two Lovers) poignant family drama, Omaha, a new dawn brings a new, ominous day....

Sundance 2025 Review: SPEAK, Heartfelt, Hopeful, Uplifting Doc

Every year, approximately 6,700 high-school students from 1,500 schools around the country participate in the National Speech and Debate Tournament (NSDT) in 42 distinct categories.   Chief among them is the Original Oratory category, the subject of the captivating documentary...

Sundance 2025 Review: THE LEGEND OF OCHI, Family-Oriented Fantasy-Adventure For the Win

After two decades directing shorts, commercials, and music videos, writer-director Isaiah Saxon makes his official feature-length debut with The Legend of Ochi, a richly imagined, Amblin-influenced family-oriented fantasy-adventure set in a semi-contemporary mythical Eastern Europe.   Bolstered by  environmental themes,...

Sundance 2025 Review: SORRY, BABY, Trauma Recovery Drama Elevated by Eva Victor's Writing, Directing, Acting

Nurtured by Pastel, Barry Jenkins’ production company, Eva Victor (Billions) wrote, directed, and stars in Sorry, Baby, one of the most remarkable, quite possibly extraordinary feature-film debuts in recent festival history.   To turn her screenplay into reality, Victor spent...

Sundance 2025 Review: PLAINCLOTHES, Undercover Cop and Repressed Desire Are Combustible Elements

Somewhere in the bowels of an upstate New York shopping mall circa 1997, the undercover cop, Lucas (Tom Blyth), in writer-director Carmen Emmi’s fascinatingly tense, engrossing character study, Plainclothes, sits quietly at a first-floor dining area, his eyes perpetually scanning...

Sundance 2025 Review: KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN, Politics, Queerness, and Jennifer Lopez

As countries on both sides of the Atlantic careen uncontrollably towards illiberalism, authoritarian, and fascism, art as an act of resistance, opposition, or defiance gains ever greater importance.   That includes an oft-adapted work, such as Manuel Puig’s 1976 postmodern...

Sundance 2025 Review: LURKER, Parasocial Obsession, Pop Stardom and Celebrity Worship, Together Again

In writer-director Alex Russell’s (Beef, The Bear, Dave) remarkably impressive feature-length debut, Lurker, a rando, a fan-turned-stan, and an obsessive narcissist with sociopathic tendencies, Matthew Morning (Théodore Pellerin), finds himself perfectly situated to leverage a supposedly chance meeting with an...

Sundance 2025 Review: DEAD LOVER, Strange, Weird, Wonderful

Both singular in vision and singular in execution, filmmaker Grace Glowicki’s fantastic horror-comedy, Dead Lover, must be seen to be disbelieved. It must be seen to be believed too.   Hyper-stylized, archly written in a hilarious camp tone (when it’s...

Sundance 2025 Review: OPUS, Even Demented Malkovich Can't Save Cult Horror Entry

Q: “What’s the difference between a religion and cult?”  A: “Time.”   There’s cult horror — as in horror that develops an offscreen cult following — and cult horror – as in a horror film about a cult. First-time writer-director...

Sundance 2025 Review: TOGETHER, Body Horror Meets Folk Horror in Genre Mash-Up

As a corollary to the “don’t buy a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere” folk-horror trope, don’t venture off-trail, negligently slip and fall into a massive hole in the ground. And whatever you do, don’t drink any water you find...

Sundance 2025 Review: ATROPIA, The Iraq War Redux, With Less Feeling

Writer-director Hailey Gates' uproarious anti-war/anti-Bush satire, Atropia, arrives either a decade too late or, just as likely given the state of the world and its discontents, a decade too early.   Gates’ film brings audiences, willingly or not, back to...

Sundance 2025 Review: IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU, Mother Gonna Knock You Out

Rose Byrne stars in Mary Bronstein's film, co-starring Conan O'Brien and A$AP Rocky.

Sundance 2025 Review: BRIDES, Empathetic, Sympathetic Cautionary Tale

Deftly directed by Nadia Fall from Suhayla El-Bushra's multi-layered screenplay, Brides examines a relatively recent, ripped-from-the-headlines subject ripe for sensationalism and exploitation.   Namely, the subject is Western-born or -raised Muslim women who left the West behind for the illusory...

Sundance 2025 Review: RABBIT TRAP, Auditory Wonders, Stunning Visuals, Abstract Narrative

Nothing, positively nothing, good comes out of purchasing a decades-old farmhouse in the middle of Wales. Or anywhere else, for that matter.   In Bryn Chainey’s contribution to the ever-expanding folk horror sub-genre, Rabbit Trap, Darcy (Oscar nominee Dev Patel)...

Sundance 2025 Review: ANDRE IS AN IDIOT, Stirring, Poignant End-of-Life Doc

By their nature, end-of-life documentaries often dwell on the hard, sometimes impossible choices that the living, the dying or soon-to-be dead have to make. Sometimes downbeat and sometimes depressing, end-of-life documentaries treat the subject matter with the respect, distance, and...

Sundance 2025 Review: TWINLESS, Enthralling, Darkly Comic, Queer-Centered Bromance

Films are often centered around a Big Lie.   In the case of multi-hyphenate director James Sweeney’s (Straight Up) enthrallingly dark, queer-centered comedy-drama, Twinless, it's a series of Big Lies, one bigger than the rest, that threaten to irrevocably derail...

EAT THE NIGHT Review: Virtual Reality Meets Gritty Crime Film

Near the end of Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s (Jessica Forever) initially promising, ultimately disappointing feature-length film, Eat the Night, a virtual screen within a screen — an MMORPG (massive multiplayer role-playing game) — hundreds, if not thousands, of digital...