Tag: sundancefilmfestival
Sundance 2026 Review: MUM, I'M ALIEN PREGNANT Pushes Sci-Fi Comedy Past Good Taste
Thunderlips revives New Zealand splatstick with a gleefully vulgar sci-fi comedy that channels early Peter Jackson.
Sundance 2026 Review: TAKE ME HOME, Deeply Personal Drama of Family in Peril
Liz Sargent's film won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: US Dramatic. Anna Sargent, Victor Slezak, Ali Ahn, Shane Harper, and Marceline Hugot star.
Sundance 2026 Wrap: We Came, We Saw, We Reviewed
As our own Ryland Aldrich noted in his wonderful essay, Ryland's Musings From Two Decades of Sundance, the Sundance Film Festival celebrated its final edition in Park City, Utah, with a bang -- and with an announcement about their annual...
Sundance 2026 Review: THE LAST FIRST: WINTER K2 Documents an Avoidable Tragedy
Amir Bar-Lev directed.
Sundance 2026 Review: ALL ABOUT THE MONEY, The Downside of Unlimited Wealth
Sinéad O'Shea directed the documentary.
Ryland's Musings From Two Decades of Sundance
It's hard for me to overstate the importance of Sundance on my career, and even my personal life in adulthood. At the height of my fest-going career, I was going to nearly two dozen festivals a year. Those trickled down...
Sundance 2025 Review: 2000 METERS TO ANDRIIVKA, Brutal Realities of Modern Warfare
Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov offers an unvarnished and unflinching look at the frontlines of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Sundance 2025 Review: THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR Looks at Stand Your Ground Laws
Elections have consequences, as pundits keep reminding us. One of those is Florida's "stand your ground" legislation, which allows the use of deadly force if people feel they are in imminent danger. Composed almost entirely of bodycam and surveillance video,...
Sundance 2025 Reviews: What We Saw, Liked and Loved
Updated 2/17/25. On January 23, 2025, the center of our genre-film loving world moved to Park City, Utah, US, where the Sundance Film Festival unveiled a broad and diverse selection of films. Our own Mel Valentin attended the festival in...
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: 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: DJ AHMET, In North Macedonia, Kids Just Want to Dance
Arif Jakup and Dora Akan Zlatanova star in a delightful culture clash romance.
Sundance 2025 Preview: Another Year of Exciting Films
It's been a bit of a weird start to 2025, but festival season is kicking off in earnest with the traditional chilly celebration of indie film that is the Sundance Film Festival. The fest includes 88 feature films in this...
Sundance 2024 Interview: DIG! XX, Ondi Timoner and Joel Gion Talk About the Passion
When documentary filmmaker Ondi Timononer and her brother David set out in the mid 90s to capture the tribulations and hopeful ascent of ten indie bands as they attempted to navigate the big bad record industry at the end of...
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 2022 Review: SHARP STICK, Raunchy Yet Touching Gen-Z Female Empowerment
Kristine Froseth, Jon Bernthal and Luka Sabbat star in Lena Dunham's refreshingly sunny pandemic romantic dramedy.
Sundance 2022 Review: MAIKA, Vietnamese Kiddy Sci-Fi Charmer From Ham Tran
What if E.T. and CJ7 had a movie baby? Versatile director Ham Tran attempts to answer that question in his latest film, Maika, making its debut in the Kids section of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Tran has dipped his...
Sundance 2021 Review: LAND, Buried in an Avalanche of Cliches
Buried in an avalanche of painfully obvious cliches, surface-deep characterizations, and unexamined privilege, Land, Robin Wright’s feature-length, filmmaking debut is about as far from auspicious as any feature-length debut can be. Elevated by Wright's impressively committed performance as a grief-haunted...
Sundance 2021 Review: CODA, A Crowd-Pleaser By Any Other Name
Deservedly or not, the word “crowd-pleaser” tends to have a negative connotation, situating a film’s potential popularity with broad demographic appeal, simple, easy-to-understand narratives, and emotionally cathartic endings. But in the second year of a global pandemic, a Before Times...
Sundance 2021 Review: IN THE EARTH, Mother Nature Gets Super Freaky
While everyone was still working on perfecting their sourdough mix or tightening their glutei during the first five or six months of a still ongoing pandemic, writer-director Ben Wheatley (High Rise, A Field in England, The Kill List), no slouch...
