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Tag: sundance 2026

  • Daniel Kwan Calls for Coordinated Industry Response to AI: “An All-Hands-on-Deck Situation”

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    Daniel Kwan has a lot to say on the subject of artificial intelligence.

    The Oscar-winning filmmaker — one half of The Daniels directing team behind Everything Everywhere All at Once alongside Daniel Scheinert — returned to Sundance in January alongside Scheinert and their producer Jonathan Wang to support the world premiere of Focus Features’ The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which they produced for another directing team in Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell.

    Amid a busy festival schedule, Kwan ducked into the Pendry Park City to headline the THR x Autodesk AI and Independent Filmmaking panel presented in partnership with the Berggruen Institute on Jan. 25. The program also featured conversations with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, filmmaker Noah Segan, producer Janet Yang and Autodesk’s Matthew Sivertson in chats moderated by THR’s Mia Galuppo and Stacey Wilson Hunt.

    Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Janet Yang, Noah Segan, Daniel Kwan and Matthew Sivertson ahead of the THR x Autodesk “AI and Independent Filmmaking” panel at Sundance.

    Credit: The Hollywood Reporter

    Kwan kicked things off, but before diving headfirst into all things AI, the filmmaker looked back on a milestone Sundance anniversary. He and Scheinert made their Sundance debut 10 years ago with the Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano starrer Swiss Army Man, which was acquired out of the fest by A24 and earned them best director trophies.

    “Ten years is kind of wild,” Kwan said, before launching into a warning about the social media trend that inspired countless users to post retrospective 2016 photos on multiple platforms from Instagram to TikTok to Threads. “I’ve been thinking a lot about 2016 because of that trend right now. By the way, don’t do that. They’re using that to train their machines on you to show how people age. Stop it, stop posting stuff, OK? Just be careful, OK? Be careful with these things.”

    Actually, Kwan emphasized care, caution and vigilance throughout the nearly 30-minute discussion, which covered The AI Doc, the recently launched Creators Coalition on AI and the urgency to participate at this critical juncture before AI companies set the rules of engagement and leave various industries and the general public to pick up the pieces: “We are not ready for this and we are the collateral damage.”

    “We are currently in a transition,” Kwan acknowledged. “Things are coming to an end, but that also means something else is coming. If we can all agree that that’s true, we first have to mourn the things that are ending but protect what really matters in that mourning. Once we see what’s coming to an end, we can protect what matters and plant the seeds for what’s coming next. So much of my work is motivated by that one single principle, whether it’s in AI or the stories I’m telling, the movies that Daniel and I are trying to make as this old world ends. What can we protect? What can we fight for? What can we plant for the next world?”

    In the immediate future, they’ll be planting The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. The film is set for release on March 27, and Kwan said it covers all the main AI issues and features nearly all of the big names from the industry. What it doesn’t cover is his regret in making it.

    “A wonderful team worked for the past over three years on this doc, and we spent a lot of time just trying to figure out how do we show people what the main drivers are behind everything that’s happening? How do we get past all the bullshit, all the hype and all of that noise to show people some sort of way to regain some agency?” he explained. “Every other month I regretted saying yes to this project, if I’m being very honest. Honestly, I’m sick of talking about AI. Who else is sick of talking about AI? I don’t want to just be negative because this technology is both good and bad at the same time. Just like any other technology, every tool can be used for good and for bad. You can build things and break things with the same tool. The problem is with human nature, and entropy, in general. Oftentimes, building things is much harder than breaking things and, right now, the breaking things is much easier.”

    That said, Kwan noted how AI technology can both be “amazing” and “terrible” for filmmakers. “The one thing that we all have to agree on is that this technology is incompatible with our current systems, our current institutions, our current labor laws. It carves a bunch of lines through all these walls that we’ve put up over the last 100 years.”

    As AI carves those lines, Kwan said it is imperative that industries, like Hollywood, band together to help set the guardrails. “This is an all-hands-on-deck situation,” he said. “How do we imagine a world where this tool is not just something that we’re fighting but also something that can transform our industry to make it much better? Be honest, our industry is not perfect.”

    Kwan speaks during the THR x Autodesk “AI and Independent Filmmaking” panel at Sundance.

    Credit: The Hollywood Reporter

    The moment during the panel that generated the most laughter and response from the nearly 100 or so guests in the room came when Kwan used a “sex positive” analogy to describe the best response to widespread adoption of AI tools.

    “It’s a crude one, but it’s worth saying because it sticks,” he explained before launching into it. “We’re all sex positive here [so imagine if] you have a relationship with someone. They’re loving and it’s great, but they’re not always the best communicator. They say, ‘Hey, we’re having an orgy. We’re bringing a bunch of people over. Doesn’t that sound great?’ And you’re like, ‘Hold on. Who’s coming? What are the rules? What are the safe words?’ And they’re like, ‘No, no, no, no. Look at the tools and the toys we have. We’re going to have a dungeon.’ This is what the tech industry feels like to a lot of crew members.”

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    Chris Gardner

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  • ‘Saccharine’ Review: Midori Francis Navigates the Hallucinatory Minefield Between Body Image and Body Horror in Messy Weight-Loss Freakout

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    There’s nothing sweet about Saccharine, but just as it should be gaining traction, nothing terribly coherent about it either. Natalie Erika James throws a bunch of great ideas into her fem-horror riff on body dysmorphia, shame and the tireless quest for physical perfection in a culture obsessed with youthful hotness — following in the path of The Substance and Ryan Murphy’s latest dollop of high-gloss trash, The Beauty. But the storytelling goes haywire, to the point where you’re unsure what the Australian writer-director wants to say, though her game lead, Midori Francis, keeps you watching.

    James’ visually stylish film, acquired by IFC and Shudder ahead of its Midnight bow at Sundance, has some originality thanks to a subtle grounding in the Buddhist/Taoist folk tradition of the hungry ghost. But James never commits fully enough to the spiritual/supernatural side to add much dimension to the confused narrative. While the protagonist is Japanese Australian, the movie has a feel closer to Thai horror in atmosphere, if not in intensity or dread.

    Saccharine

    The Bottom Line

    Let them eat cake.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Midnight)
    Cast: Midori Francis, Danielle Macdonald, Madeleine Madden, Robert Taylor, Showko Showfukutei, Emily Milledge, Joseph Baldwin, Louisa Mignon, Annie Shapiro
    Director-screenwriter: Natalie Erika James

    1 hour 52 minutes

    Obsessively recording her observations in a journal and charting her progress on a graph, Melbourne med student Hana (Francis) is determined to get down to her goal weight of 60 kilograms (132 pounds). Her unspoken attraction to toned and confident gym trainer Alanya (Madeleine Madden) might be part of the incentive, given that Hana is queer more in theory than practice. She signs up to be Alanya’s guinea pig in a 12-week fitness program.

    While she’s out at a club with her student pals Josie (Danielle Macdonald) and Georgie (Emily Milledge), Hana runs into an old friend, Melissa (Annie Shapero). Hana doesn’t recognize her at first, until it clicks that Melissa is the svelte transformation of the heavy, bullied girl she knew in high school. Telling Hana that the girl from back then is dead, Melissa puts her astonishing weight loss down to a miracle drug she calls “the gray,” giving Hana a few tablets and urging her to try them.

    Melissa’s insistence is somewhat questionable since Hana looks like a normal-size young woman by non-Hollywood standards, even with some prosthetic enhancement. But perhaps that’s part of James’ point — that body expectations for women are so unrealistic that many, like Hana, are driven to starvation and self-loathing. Except that with “the gray,” Melissa swears she can eat as much as she wants and not gain weight.

    Which appears to be the case when Hana wakes up after a heavy night of clubbing with the messy debris of a large takeout assortment on her bedroom floor and yet somehow feels different. She’s sufficiently intrigued to analyze the pills in the university medical lab, discovering a compound of phosphates and … human ashes. Luckily, she has a cadaver handy, one of several people who donated their bodies to science and are getting cut up in class.

    The body assigned to Hana, Josie and their lab teammates is a corpulent woman cruelly nicknamed “Big Bertha.” Hana starts taking home a rib cage here, a few bones there, grinding them up with a mortar and pestle to make her own DIY version of the gray. The compound works, and while her gluttonous binges become increasingly uncontrolled — filmed by James and DP Charlie Sarroff like woozy Francis Bacon images — her weight keeps plummeting. That gets her an admiring comment, an Instagram post and perhaps a flicker of sexual interest from Alanya.

    But homemade meds can come with unexpected side effects — in this case, ghoulish visitations from the hangry Bertha, looking like a cross between Eric Cartman and Nosferatu. Visible only to Hana at first, in convex reflective surfaces like a kettle or the back of a spoon, Bertha does not take kindly to Hana’s attempts to kick the pill habit and start policing her food intake the old-fashioned way.

    In one of the funnier episodes, the spectral presence shoots candy bars from Hana’s rucksack across the room at her until she shovels them in her mouth in a rattled semi-trance state. It’s unclear whether Bertha is also enraged by Hana’s weight continuing to drop — she gets down to 45 kilograms (99 pounds) at one point — but girl, we’ve all been there with the body envy.

    James’ 2020 debut feature, Relic — a slow-burn chiller about three generations of women tormented by a presence in the family home — worked because the director never allowed her control of the material to slacken, even when the narrative was stretched a bit thin. But Saccharine slips off the rails, especially once Hana convinces Josie that Bertha’s spirit has latched onto her in malevolent ways, growing bigger and stronger all the time.

    The always terrific Macdonald (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You) is under-used, and the rebuke of confident, plus-size Josie to Hana for letting fatphobia curb her self-acceptance is a point made too hurriedly to register.

    Scenes with Hana’s parents seem intended to shed more light than they actually do, with some psych 101 subtext suggested by the fussing of her birdlike Japanese mother (Showko Showfukutei) and the remoteness of her mostly immobile Australian dad (Robert Taylor), who is steadily eating himself to death. But the parental elements just end up seeming like narrative clutter, with nothing gained by the teasing delayed reveal of Hana’s XL father.

    The climactic scenes toy with the blurred lines between hallucination and reality, but the logic falls apart; threads like Hana’s rash decision to undertake a dangerous surgical fix virtually evaporate without much payoff. And at just under two hours, the movie could seriously benefit from cutting some flab.

    Saccharine is more polished in its technical aspects than in its storytelling, from the queasy visuals (Sarroff shot Relic, as well as both Smile movies) and sickly lighting to composer Hannah Peel’s eerie synths to some impressively gnarly gore. Ultimately, however, the biggest plus is Francis, whose commitment to the central role is so unfaltering that she makes the script’s rough patches less of a deal-breaker.

    James has no lack of talent, but fans of Relic who were hoping this might be a return to form after the mixed-bag Rosemary’s Baby prequel Apartment 7A — either as a juicy serve of Cronenbergian feminism or a movie with something to say about accessible weight-loss meds — will likely be disappointed.

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    David Rooney

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  • ‘Antiheroine’ Review: Courtney Love Comes Clean About Highs, Lows and Needing to Be Heard in a Rock Doc Both Raucous and Intimate

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    Of the many insights into turbulent genius Courtney Love in Brit filmmakers Edward Lovelace and James Hall’s adoring biographical doc Antiheroine, the most captivating is the alt rock queen’s sense of humor about her reputation as a wild-child wrecking ball with an endless catalogue of messy transgressions. “Everyone has a Courtney story,” she says early on with a shrug. “She fucked my boyfriend. She stole my grandmother’s wedding ring. She ate my muesli.” Love is not interested in denying or confirming any of these claims, and it’s her unapologetic, unfiltered candor that makes her a great hang.

    If you’ve ever screamed along or jumped around in your underwear to “Violet” or “Olympia” — no, that’s not a confession — you are sure to find this exploratory step back into the spotlight thrilling. It’s an overdue reaffirmation of Love’s place in rock history with an intimate glimpse into her creative process, especially as a lyricist, while she works on her first album of new material in more than a decade.

    Antiheroine

    The Bottom Line

    An unholy icon sheds her celebrity skin.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
    With: Courtney Love, Michael Stipe, Melissa Auf der Maur, Eric Erlandson, Patty Schemel, Billie Joe Armstrong, Butch Walker
    Directors: Edward Lovelace, James Hall

    1 hour 38 minutes

    “I’m a household name stuck in 1994,” Love says, referring to the year that, within the same week, her husband Kurt Cobain died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, and her band, Hole, released the angry howl Live Through This, one of the best and most ageless albums of the ‘90s. Vilified by the press and detested by Nirvana fans, Love says that when the jokes started about her having killed Cobain, she knew that was going to be her whole life from then on.

    In allowing their subject to tell her own story, Lovelace and Hall make it clear that Love refuses to see herself as a victim. She owns the charges of being abrasive, rude, scrappy, ferociously ambitious and a complicated figure in music history. But the fearlessness and determination with which she pulled herself back up from the depths make her a survivor, one whose music served as her armor through drug addiction, illness, controversy and everything else the world could throw at her.

    Even when defending her talent, so often unfairly written off, Love seems unconcerned about being liked. Of the artistic intent behind Hole’s 1991 debut album Pretty on the Inside, she says: “It was me announcing that I was a great fucking poet, and me announcing my persona as a cunt.” Her longtime friend Michael Stipe puts her in the Marianne Faithfull school of women in music: “Fuck you, this is who I am.”

    The recap of Love’s early life is brisk but illuminating. Born in San Francisco in 1964, she grew up in what she describes as a countercultural household. Her father lost custody for giving her LSD at age four. She had her first drink at age 10, when a stepfather she calls “evil” deliberately got her smashed and made her sick for days.

    Her narcissistic mother moved the family to New Zealand in 1973, but Love was sent back to live in Portland with family friends after being expelled from school for bad behavior. At age 14 she was arrested for shoplifting a Kiss T-shirt and sent to a juvenile hall for a spell, where a counsellor gave her a copy of Patti Smith’s seminal Horses album, which Love says changed her life.

    All this is related first-hand by Love, and an occasional detail here and there gives the vague impression that too many fried brain cells have made her an unreliable narrator. It’s unclear at times if it’s the punchy edit (Jinx Godfrey, Dan Setford and Daniel Lapira are credited in that role) or Love’s attention span that keeps the conversation bouncing around.

    But the trajectory is raw and real, at times making you wonder how Love even made it into her 20s. And irrespective of how much her mind pings from one thing to another, often sparked by journal entries that bring the past to life, the doc leaves no doubt that her intelligence, humor and drive are what have kept her going.

    She shares youthful memories of hanging out with and learning from post-punk bands in Liverpool like Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, whose frontman Julian Cope Love says taught her how to walk into a room and behave like a rock star.

    She started playing guitar in 1980 and moved back to San Francisco, already knowing how to get famous, in her own words, and just needing money and discipline to get there. The movie makes a cogent case that being a rock star was wired into her metabolism rather than something she methodically set out to do.

    Even brutal experiences became fodder for her creativity, like a near rape from which she ran in a ripped dress with one shoe back to her Hollywood Blvd. apartment, then picked up her guitar and wrote Hole’s 1990 debut single, “Retard Girl.” Hole has long been acknowledged as an important feminist band, which is validated by a back catalogue of unflinching songs about sexual politics, exploitation, misogyny and objectification. Love is the composer of “Doll Parts,” after all.

    She is forthright about her drug use and addiction, whether to heroin or fame, and credits Milos Forman with saving her life when he fought to cast her in The People vs, Larry Flynt and later in Man on the Moon, sending her to rehab to get clean before the first movie.

    The real meat of the doc, for many, will be Love’s thoughts looking back on her relationship and marriage with Cobain, captured in affecting archival images and home movies. Music, talent and mutual admiration were their magnet, and Stipe describes the couple as “these two intelligent, raw people riffing off each other in a beautiful way.”

    Love talks about the common experience of parental rejection that drew them closer; about the dream of their wedding in Hawaii like “being on acid;” and she tenderly recalls a tranquil period after the birth of their daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, when they retreated to Washington state and found a bubble of happiness out of the public eye.

    This idyll occurred because the family was forced to leave California — when custody of Frances was at risk after allegations emerged in a Vanity Fair profile that Love was doing drugs while pregnant. (Love points out that she took weekly drug tests throughout her pregnancy.) But that contradiction between public vilification and private peace is part of the mystique surrounding their marriage.

    There’s clearly still a lot of pain as Love speaks ruefully about how she ultimately was better equipped for fame than Kurt, who craved oblivion and found it too easily. Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur recalls heroin being everywhere when the alternative grunge scene was cresting, and the sight of people shooting up backstage was not uncommon. Cobain overdosed on Rohypnol and spent three days in a coma in Rome the year he died, while Nirvana was touring Europe.

    The torture of knowing Kurt tried to call her at the Peninsula Beverly Hills, and the desk staff failed to connect him despite Love’s instructions to put him through at any time, obviously still haunts her. She considers that the moment he died.

    Self-pity is not in Love’s vocabulary, but band members and friends talk about how the Hole touring schedule, right after Cobain’s suicide, gave her no time to grieve. There are moving accounts of her delivering 100 percent onstage and then crumpling backstage, “a broken, tortured person trying to overcome the pain of her entire life.” The lack of humanity from people determined to make her the villain left scars.

    The film drifts over much of the past two decades except to say that Love stayed clean, turned to Buddhism and rediscovered her need to write music after decamping to London. There’s a brief discussion of Frances obtaining legal emancipation from her mother in 2009, when she was 17, and the daughter’s absence among interviewees is conspicuous. Love volunteers that she was no picnic as a parent, though her joy at one point when she’s flying off to California to see her grandson hints that there’s been at least some degree of repair to the relationship.

    There are other notable absences, including collaborators like the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, who co-wrote several songs on the 1998 Hole album Celebrity Skin, including the hits “Malibu” and the title track, and helped smooth the band’s transition into a more commercial pop-punk sound. (Love amusingly calls it “my dark Fleetwood Mac record.”)

    But Lovelace and Hall make no claim of presenting an exhaustive chronology, mostly leaving it to their subject to go where her reflections take her. That predominantly becomes the new album, which is still in the works, with no news of completion or a release date. Stipe, who co-wrote some of the new songs, confidently calls the album a classic: “We’ll see how the world responds to it.”

    After years of sitting it out as other people told her story, at times with gross misrepresentations, Love just wants to get the album right and have her say in music, which she points out is the only way anyone will listen to her. The fragments of the new songs we hear — either tinkering away on them at home or laying down vocals in the studio, at one point with Auf der Maur in a gorgeous reunion moment — sound promising.

    Says Love: “I got kicked out of the party and now I’m coming back after a very long time.” I won’t be the only one rooting for her renaissance.

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    David Rooney

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  • ‘The Only Living Pickpocket in New York’ Review: John Turturro Mesmerizes as a Small-Time Hustler Facing Obsolescence in Fine-Grained Crime Thriller

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    Rarely does an opening song choice so precisely define the mood of a film like LCD Soundsystem’s exquisitely tortured anthem “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down” over the opening frames of writer-director Noah Segan’s quiet knockout, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. James Murphy’s melancholy vocals capture the unlivable but unleavable push-pull of the city, wistfully looking back at its grubby past while lamenting the shiny soullessness and skyrocketing exclusivity of its present.

    Those sentiments seem to come directly from John Turturro as Harry Lehman, a nimble-fingered thief with a watchful gaze, always scoping a potential score on the streets or subways.

    The Only Living Pickpocket in New York

    The Bottom Line

    Contemplative, cool-headed and transfixing.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
    Cast: John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, Will Price, Tatiana Maslany, Steve Buscemi, Lori Tan Chinn, Kelvin Han Yee, Karina Arroyave, John Gallagher Jr., Victoria Moroles, Jack Mulhern, Michael Hsu Rosen, Aida Turturro, Mark Cayne
    Director-screenwriter: Noah Segan

    1 hour 28 minutes

    The song also suggests the movie’s pervasive subtextual nostalgia for the analog past — felt by the small-time career criminal, but no less by an old-school detective being shoved aside to make way for the clever kids in the cyber unit, by a crusty pawn shop owner fencing stolen goods or a steely crime matriarch, taking care of business and adapting to the times, but not shy about admitting she misses the bad old days.

    Turturro is unshowy but magnificent in his best film role in years, an honorable hustler who still carries himself with dignity despite a lifetime of regrets and a world gradually leaving him behind. At least until he unwittingly targets the wrong mark and has to think and act fast to protect the people he cares about and secure his own sorrowful redemption.

    Harry could be described as a counterpart on the other side of the law from John Stone, the wearily disheveled attorney played by Turturro in HBO’s riveting limited series, The Night Of — even if Harry has a greater appreciation for good tailoring. What makes Segan’s movie so intoxicating, however, is not just the depth of its inside-and-out central character study but the granular textures of the world Harry inhabits and the incisively drawn secondary characters played by a deep bench of very fine and impeccably cast actors.

    Segan has clearly been paying attention during his long association with Rian Johnson, who first cast him in Brick and has found roles for him in pretty much everything since. He moved into directing with a segment of the 2019 horror anthology, Scare Package, following in 2022 with his first solo feature, the Shudder vampire flick Blood Relatives. Segan’s latest is a complete swerve into more nuanced genre territory and more complex storytelling, not to mention a singularly great New York movie. The hypnotic, patiently held closing shot alone will strike a chord with natives, transplants and ex-residents alike.

    The opening scene is a model of narrative economy. A well-heeled businessman (John Gallagher Jr.) applies a spritz of cologne, slips on his chunky Philippe Patek watch and exits his upscale apartment building, heading for the subway when no cabs materialize. All we see is a quick shot of peak-hour strap-hangers packed in tight, with Harry close behind the guy. Cut to the end of a lunch meeting, when the businessman reaches for his wallet and finds it gone.

    Harry obviously has been at this game since he was a young man, when more people carried thick wads of cash. Still, he scrapes by, offloading resaleable items through his old friend Ben (an endearingly spiky Steve Buscemi) and laughing off the suggestion of tech-savvy young scammer Eve (Victoria Moroles) that he should shift to online theft.

    While he’s not exactly Robin Hood, Harry is an oddly principled man considering how he makes his living. He believes in circulating his stolen dough where it matters — whether it’s a healthcare worker at the facility that looks after his nonverbal, disabled wife Rosie (Karina Arroyave) during the day; or a neighbor in their Bronx apartment building who looks in on her when she’s at home and Harry steps out to ply his trade.

    Turturro gives Harry a sad-eyed appearance offset by a frequently jokey manner. But it’s the thoughtfulness and resourcefulness of a man whose cerebral cogs are constantly turning that defines him.

    One of the most poignant aspects of his performance is the way his face is transformed by love and devotion when he’s with Rosie — gently brushing her hair; carrying her up multiple flights of stairs and then returning for her wheelchair when the elevator is out of order; cheerfully nattering away in one-sided conversations; or spinning “Native New Yorker” on vinyl and goofily dancing around the room serenading her.

    Things go wrong for Harry when he unwittingly steals from the swaggering young scion of a crime family, Dylan (punchy live-wire Will Price), lifting a gym bag from the kid’s car that contains a luxury watch, guns and a USB card loaded with a fortune in cryptocurrency. Harry has no idea what it is and nor does Ben, whose dinosaur desktop is about 500 upgrades short of the capability necessary to read the thing. Ben sends him to another fence in Chinatown (Kelvin Han Yee), who takes the USB and a few other items off Harry’s hands.

    Dylan and his posse are well-connected, so it takes them relatively little time to track down Harry using CCTV footage. Threatening to harm Rosie if he doesn’t deliver, Dylan gives Harry just a few hours to retrieve the USB and return it to him.

    Watching The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, you are reminded of how rarely we now get to see movies fully shot on locations in the city and how there really is no substitute for the real thing.

    Cinematographer Sam Levy, whose long string of credits includes Frances Ha, Lady Bird and His Three Daughters, captures the bodegas, the subway trains and platforms, the tenements, storefronts and bustling street life with crispness but also a slightly rough-hewn, unvarnished quality, heightening the kinship with gritty New York movies of the ‘70s.

    Harry’s against-the-clock quest to ensure Rosie’s safety takes him back to Chinatown and from there to Brooklyn. Segan’s tight plotting amplifies the necessity for anyone in Harry’s profession of being able to come up with solutions on the fly. One such instance is an amusing bit of improvisation in which he gets backup by greasing the palm of a panhandler played by Aida Turturro.

    There’s also a very moving interlude during which Harry, claiming to be “in the neighborhood,” goes to Queens to see his estranged daughter Kelly, beautifully played by Tatiana Maslany as a knot of wounded anger. It’s that strong scene, and Harry’s contrition, that plant the idea of him preparing to make his exit. The encounter with Kelly — which reverberates in a lovely moment later on — is made even more touching by the heavily embellished account of it he shares with Rosie.

    The ways in which Harry’s detective buddy Warren (Giancarlo Esposito in fine form), Ben, Eve and Billy (Mark Cayne), a young pickpocket who gets tips from the old-timer, all factor into the closing developments demonstrate that Segan has a real gift for intricate plotting, not to mention a deft hand at creating a satisfying ending rich in emotional shading.

    The final scenes also involve a drive across the river with an extended cameo from a major-name star, whose character and Harry — in a duologue loaded with revealing insights — seem to develop an understanding, despite circumstances that could hardly be more unfavorable.

    This is a remarkably layered and rewarding story, especially for a movie running less than 90 minutes; editor Hilda Rasula keeps the pace steady and the transitions fluid. A big assist comes from Gary Lionelli’s full-bodied score, with jazzy retro funk riffs that add excitement to the early scenes and more bluesy, somber sounds in the later action.

    Even before the Cole Porter standard “I Happen to Like New York” comes in over the closing shot, it’s clear this is a movie very close to born-and-bred New Yorker Segan’s heart. It’s an adoring tip of the hat to the city and to the vast canon of New York movies. And it’s a gift to the wonderful Turturro, another native son, who imbues his role with a lifetime of personal history, underplaying everything with the most delicate restraint.

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    David Rooney

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  • The Invite Is Occasionally Funny, But That’s About It

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    Photo: The Invite/All photos are copyrighted and may be used by press only for the purpose of news or editorial coverage of Sundance Institute programs. Photos must be accompanied by a credit to the photographer and/or ‘Courtesy of Sundance Institute.’ Unauthorized use, alteration, reproduction or sale of logos and/or photos is strictly prohibited.

    It makes perfect sense that, as a director, Olivia Wilde would want to follow the extravagant, ambitious disaster of Don’t Worry Darling with a four-character chamber piece confined to one location. The Invite, based on the Spanish director Cesc Gay’s 2020 movie The People Upstairs (which was itself based on an earlier play by Gay), features an unhappy couple inviting their upstairs neighbors for a dinner party that quickly goes to some strange places; it’s the kind of supposedly focused character study that probably felt nourishing after all the off-camera craziness of Wilde’s previous directorial outing.

    We can sense the theatrical origins of the story right from the start, with downcast music teacher Joe (Seth Rogen) arriving home one evening only to find that his fussy, anxious wife Angela (Wilde) is in the middle of preparing for a dinner party for their upstairs neighbors. Joe is not only unprepared for this, he doesn’t even like these neighbors, who weird them out and keep them up at all hours having extremely loud sex. Joe and Angela’s incessant bickering early on — every observation prompting an objection or a counter-observation — telegraphs that their neighbors will probably turn out to be a lot better adjusted than they are. Sure enough, when Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pina (Penelope Cruz) arrive, they seem both relaxed and all-knowing: They confess that they heard Joe and Angela arguing loudly before they even rang the doorbell. He’s a retired firefighter, she’s a sexologist, and suddenly the upstairs neighbors have the upper hand, psychologically speaking.

    The Invite is primarily a comedy, and it does have some solid laughs, though the character interactions can also feel so manufactured that our bullshit detectors start going off fairly early. Angela, we’re told, is hypervigilant and neurotic — their daughter is at a sleepover and Angela tells Joe she called beforehand to ensure that there will be no men or weapons present in the friend’s house — and she’s apparently also on top of current mores and attitudes from days spent listening to podcasts. Funny, sure, but somehow, Angela also manages to organize an entire meal based on meat and cheese without ever checking to make sure her neighbors can eat such things. (It turns out, of course, that Pina can’t.) This is minor stuff, meant to add to an accumulation of interpersonal awkwardness, but such inconsistencies add up and deflate the characters’ believability. If in something like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf the characters’ inadequacies and resentments fuel their increasingly erratic behavior, here these people feel like grab bags of punchlines, their actions there primarily to get laughs.

    More worryingly, the film’s stylized, theatrical dialogue only really works onscreen if there’s a musicality to the words and a rhythm to the back and forth. Wilde manages to undermine that through aggressive, insistent music cues that flatten everything out — almost as if she doesn’t trust the script, credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, to do the trick. Still, these are good actors, and each brings their unique style. As a comic performer, Wilde (who also gives a tremendous performance in another Sundance movie this year, Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex) excels at going big — precise in her timing, unafraid to exaggerate for comic effect — while Rogen deploys his usual goofy, improv-style cadences — stumbling over words, anxiously repeating himself, swallowing punchlines.

    When Norton and Cruz show up, they bring their own vibes: He’s soft-spoken and even keeled, she’s a bit of a flower child. This is all intentional, surely. You don’t go with a cast like this if you don’t want these actors to do their own individual things. And it does pay off, occasionally: Entering the apartment, Hawk and Pina talk a lot about the décor and the energy in the room, and Joe responds, snarkily, “We talked a lot about capturing energy, as if it’s a thing we could actually do.” But it takes seriously sharp writing and directorial control to make all these people feel like they exist in the same movie, and the truth is that the performances don’t really cohere.

    Wilde leans into the comedy as much as possible, often framing shots for maximum visual humor. At its best, The Invite uses the spaces of this apartment well, putting dead air between its alienated characters and bringing them physically closer over the course of the film. But even here, the tonal whipsawing can backfire. As I noted earlier, The Invite goes to some odd places, but with each new turn in these relationships, the picture loses steam, perhaps because they’ve never come across as real people and these emotional twists don’t feel fully earned. Meanwhile, the shticky humor of the first hour makes for a disappointing mismatch with the awkward earnestness of the finale, as the characters all get their sentimental, tedious monologues, now complete with soft music on the soundtrack. (The movie is, frankly, a clinic in how not to use a score.)

    Wilde’s directorial debut Booksmart, released in 2019 to great acclaim, worked in large part because she brought so much inventiveness to a familiar and chaotic coming-of-age tale, using technique to overcome the story’s tonal challenges. Don’t Worry Darling, by contrast, felt too stilted and controlled, too programmed and predictable, almost as if the director felt obligated to rein in her stylistic impulses against a supposedly more complicated story. The Invite feels at times like a film that could have benefited from more control. It’s too baggy to really work as a chamber piece. (It’s not a particularly long movie, but it drags considerably after a while.) But it also doesn’t really give Wilde any real opportunities to cut loose and demonstrate her strengths as a director, which once seemed so considerable.


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    Bilge Ebiri

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  • ‘Leviticus’ Review: A Sad, Frightening Conversion-Therapy Horror From Australia

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    While the happy and only barely tortured gay romance of Heated Rivalry sweeps the nation, nay the world, it might be instructive, if depressing, to remind ourselves that there are many young queer people who have a much harder time realizing their desires. The new film Leviticus, from director Adrian Chiarella, is a solemn and frightening acknowledgment of that reality, albeit one allegorized into supernatural horror. 

    The film takes place in a dreary town in Victoria, Australia, a drab industrial backwater whose people — or, at least some of whom — flock to religion to give their lives the brightness of hope and higher purpose. Teenager Niam (Joe Bird) has just moved to town with his mum (a deceptively sinister Mia Wasikowska) but already yearns to escape it. He finds some deliverance, of the emotional kind anyway, in a classmate, Ryan (Stacy Clausen), a handsome ruffian with whom Niam shares a special bond. They have found love, or at least affectionate lust, in a hopeless place, just as many kids have done before them, since time immemorial.

    Leviticus

    The Bottom Line

    A stylish, urgent allegory.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Midnight)
    Cast: Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, Mia Wasikowska
    Director and writer: Adrian Chiarella

    1 hour 26 minutes

    Chief on the film’s mind is what happens when the relative innocence of that blush of first infatuation — neither boy seems particularly troubled by his proclivity — is spoiled by outside forces, like family and the church. As a hardcore religious right gains traction around the globe, Leviticus challenges the notion, made too easy to accept by the Heartstoppers and Love, Simons of the world, that coming out isn’t really such a big deal anymore. It is still — perhaps increasingly so, in this moment of backslide — monumental and dangerous for plenty of young people, often plunging their lives into horror.

    Chiarella is particularly interested in the abuses of conversion therapy, which hideously imagines that something innate can be excised or, at least, wholly ignored. It is a form of torture, one whose effects can cause lingering and sometimes fatal harm. Such trauma is made manifest in Leviticus, in which these afflicted kids are stalked by a sinister force that, cruelly and perversely, takes the form of the person they most want in the world.

    It’s a grim and clever conceit, even if its rules don’t always make total sense. What the device does most effectively is force the audience to think about the real-world analog of these characters’ psychic (and physical) pain: the many young people who have been told that their sexual and romantic desire will destroy them, that a fundamental human attraction is something they must flee from in mortal terror. How heartbreaking, and how vile, that any adult claiming compassion would seek to imbue a child with that extreme allergy to their own self. 

    Leviticus has a enough gore and jumpy moments to qualify it as a proper horror film. But its true scariness is of the forlorn kind, as Naim and Ryan grow distrustful of each other, not sure if the needful, seductive person they see before them is real or a menacing specter who means to kill them. That doleful eeriness is the film’s best asset, adding a tragic queer love story to the template of youth-curse films like It Follows and Talk to Me. Both Bird and Clausen play this mounting nightmare with the appropriate ache and desperation, elevating the emotional tenor of Chiarella’s sad, frequently bleak film. Sure, Clausen is pretty enough that one wonders why he doesn’t just monetize his Instagram and flee to Sydney, but otherwise both he and Bird appropriately register as two small-towners trapped in a toxic community, starkly rendered in Chiarella’s drab austerity. 

    Though his metaphors are awfully on the nose, Chiarella convincingly insists on their power. He has made his argumentative trick work quite well, even if the movie’s messaging sometimes crosses into the obvious or didactic. And anyway, maybe we are at a time, yet again, when such simple lessons bear repeating, when it is not lame or dated to highlight the terrible violations of the most basic kind of homophobia. 

    There is also, perhaps, a slightly radical suggestion teased out toward the end of Chiarella’s film, one that harkens back to so many narratives of the past: Those stories told of uncles and sons and countless others who fled their oppression in search of something they knew to be true and decent, waiting for them in distant, glittering cities. Leviticus has the sturdy nerve and conviction to plainly state that sometimes home and family are irredeemable and worth abandoning. It is not so concerned with changing hearts and minds, but with saving lives. 

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    Richard Lawson

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  • ‘Hot Water’ Review: Lubna Azabal and Daniel Zolghadri Go West in a Slight but Sensitive Mother-Son Road Movie

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    A mother-son road movie more laced with humor than laden with trauma, Hot Water marks a warm and sensitive, if not entirely satisfying, debut feature from Ramzi Bashour.

    There’s an undeniable familiarity that nips at the heels (or wheels?) of the film as it traverses classic American landscapes alongside its protagonists, a tightly wound Lebanese woman (Lubna Azabal) and her turbulent, U.S.-raised teenager (Daniel Zolghadri). We’ve been here before — in this situation, with these types, against these backdrops. Every year at Sundance, to be exact.

    Hot Water

    The Bottom Line

    Warm and sweet, if not entirely satisfying.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Dramatic Competition)
    Cast: Lubna Azabal, Daniel Zolghadri, Dale Dickey, Gabe Fazio
    Director-writer: Ramzi Bashour

    1 hour 37 minutes

    Luckily, the leads are good company, and there’s just enough in Hot Water that feels fresh and personal to lift it above dreaded indie staleness. Bashour has a light touch, an aversion to exposition, histrionics and overt sentimentality, that serves the material well.

    If the film’s modesty, its glancing quality, is a strength, it’s also a limitation. There’s a nagging sense that the writer-director is just skimming the surface of his characters, their relationship to each other and to the country they live in. The Syrian-American Bashour knows these people and their story in his bones — the movie has several autobiographical elements — but he doesn’t always translate that depth of understanding to the screen.

    The problem is an excess of tact — a reluctance to really dive into the ideas simmering here, to allow the central pair’s experience of forced proximity on the open American road to palpably complicate or illuminate their respective identities and points of view. As pleasant, and occasionally poignant, as Hot Water is, it never commits fully to either its comedy or the emotions that often feel assumed rather than earned. And Bashour is not yet a sophisticated enough filmmaker to conjure richness of meaning with the narrative and visual economy of a Debra Granik, a Kelly Reichardt or an Eliza Hittman, to name (perhaps unfairly) some American neo-realist touchstones to emerge from Sundance.

    Hot Water is Bashour’s third collaboration with writer-director Max Walker-Silverman: The latter is a producer here, while Bashour composed the music for Walker-Silverman’s quiet soul-stirrer A Love Song and edited his more ambitious but less affecting follow-up, Rebuilding. Theirs is a softer, fuzzier regional cinema than the aforementioned auteurs’ work, infused with a wistful belief in the redemptive promise of American community, as well as a reverence for the natural beauty we take for granted.

    In A Love Song and Rebuilding, the protagonists are rooted to the land in a way that Hot Water’s Layal (Azabal), a foreign-born professor of Arabic at an Indiana college, is not. Layal’s ambivalence toward her adopted home is a note of discordancy that the film never taps for its full dramatic potential — an example of how Bashour’s gentle approach veers toward a sort of frictionless amiability. The movie is full of fleeting interpersonal clashes, but deeper social and political undercurrents are left largely unexamined.

    The catalyst in Hot Water comes when Layal’s son Daniel (Zolghadri) attacks another student with a hockey stick, getting himself expelled from the high school that’s already held him back twice. Out of options and patience, Layal decides to drive Daniel out to Santa Cruz to live with his father and finish out his senior year. Cue the procession of sunbaked cornfields, plains dotted with wind turbines, snow-capped mountains, craggy red rock, and the neon pageantry of the Vegas Strip. The expected stops at motels, diners and gas stations are punctuated by Layal’s fraught phone calls back to Beirut, where her sister reports on their mother’s declining health.

    Hot Water ambles along agreeably, buoyed by the believably fluid dynamic between Layal and Daniel. The filmmaker and his performers don’t overplay the fractiousness; there’s tension in their relationship, but also teasing affection, respect and a push-pull of aggravation and amusement that is the near-universal dance of parents and teenagers. Daniel gets a kick out of winding his mom up and watching her go off; she chastises him for bad choices and ribs him for not speaking better Arabic. Bashour and DP Alfonso Herrera Salcedo favor straightforward two-shots to showcase that interplay, rather than close-ups capturing instances of individual reflection or realization.

    “Why are you so tense and bummed all the time?” Daniel asks Layal, a question that hints at the gulf that separates this middle-class American kid and his immigrant single mom. He has enjoyed the privilege of nonchalance, of messing up, while she has endured the stress of providing a good life for her son while navigating cultural bewilderments like “chicken-fried steak” and students demanding do-overs on botched oral presentations.

    I could have happily watched a whole film about Layal’s on-campus life teaching Arabic to mostly white students. A priceless, too-brief scene of her coaching a smiling, square-jawed bro through some challenging pronunciation indeed suggests Bashour doesn’t necessarily recognize what his most distinctive material is. Ditto a glimpse of Daniel, shirtless, rehearsing pick-up lines in the mirror — a seemingly throwaway moment that’s slyer and more intimate than much of the rest of the movie.

    Tossing Layal and Daniel into a car and onto the road is perhaps the least interesting, and certainly easiest, way into this story, allowing the filmmaker to push them into confrontation with each other, and with America, rather than coaxing out conflict organically. To his credit, and in keeping with the spirit of the film, Bashour exercises restraint. Layal and Daniel do more bickering than blowing up, and Hot Water doesn’t over-indulge in fish-out-of-water shtick or ambush them with rednecks and racists.

    Rather, their journey is textured with odd little encounters, some more compelling than others. Dale Dickey shows up as a benevolent, aphorism-dispensing hippie in an interlude that plays like filler. I preferred the unusually composed kid working the front desk of a motel (“I don’t know, I don’t eat meat,” he notes after referring a hungry Layal and Daniel to a nearby Jack in the Box). Or the run-in with a ripe-smelling hitchhiker, which at first appears to reveal a generational divide between mother and son before uniting them in revulsion.

    Azabal (Incendies, The Blue Caftan), alternating among English, Arabic and French with regal impatience, is the kind of performer who can convey fierce love and pride with a mere glance, through sunglasses no less. Layal is perpetually harried — her exasperated “Oh, Daniel!” when he sneezes with a mouth full of carrot cake is perfection — but there’s also a sincere wonderment in the way she looks at her son. Zolghadri, so terrific in Owen Kline’s Funny Pages, flaunts the same gift for note-perfect line delivery here, pivoting seamlessly from sarcasm to authentic feeling and back again.

    The leads are so strong that the movie’s reliance on cutesy shorthand — Layal’s constant hand sanitizing and her compulsive clementine-eating as a replacement for smoking, Daniel and Layal exiting their motel room in a slow-mo strut (have mercy, filmmakers: no more slow-mo struts) — registers as an unnecessary distraction. These actors don’t need things in boldface to build out their characters.

    The final section, with its minor twist and succession of heart-to-hearts, seems calculated to surprise and stir, but underwhelms. It’s the offhanded bits of Hot Water that land most potently — the ones that hint at aches and yearnings beyond the immediate needs of the plot. “Did you say bye to the house?” Layal asks Daniel as they prepare to pull out of their driveway and hit the road. “The house has no ears, mom,” he mocks. Then, when she gets out of the car to grab something, he gazes up at the home he’s about to leave behind, and whispers: “Bye, house.” That kind of moment, tiny but casually heart-piercing, makes you impatient to see what Bashour does next.

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    Jon Frosch

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  • Quirky Comedy ‘The Gallerist’ Asks a Bold Question: Can a Dead Body Be Art?

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    If you were at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2024, you might have noticed a surprising face amidst the art lovers and buyers. It was Natalie Portman, attending the festival to research for her role in The Gallerist—a dark comedy in which she plays a desperate gallerist who attempts to sell a dead body as a piece of art.

    Though already an art lover, Portman didn’t know much about the nuances of the contemporary art world—and its colorful characters—before joining The Gallerist. “It’s almost like ideas are art, which is kind of incredible. It’s almost like a marketplace for philosophy, in some way, which can obviously lead to sometimes bullshit and sometimes really incredible, revelatory stuff,” the actor says. “It has depth and can be ridiculous, which is kind of the best combination for when you want to tell a story.”

    Portman stars in the film as eccentric gallerist Polina Polinski, who is trying to make a name for herself and her new Miami Beach gallery. She begrudgingly invites an art influencer (Zach Galifianakis) to see the work of an emerging artist named Stella (Da’Vine Joy Randolph)—but soon finds herself scrambling alongside her assistant (Jenna Ortega) to sell a piece of art that features a corpse.

    Yan, seen here on the set of The Gallerist, first went to Sundance with her 2018 film Dead Pigs.

    Roger Do Minh.

    It’s fitting for The Gallerist to have its world premiere on January 24 at the Sundance Film Festival, where real-life buyers (and influencers) are prepared to potentially throw millions of dollars at the films they deem worthy. Cathy Yan’s biting, funny, and surprising satire revels in the clash between art and commerce. “There were a lot of really interesting ideas and themes that I personally related to as an artist, as a creative, as someone that just really wanted to explore the creative process and collaboration and the inherent tension of creating art—not just for yourself, but for the world,” the director tells Vanity Fair.

    Yan is deeply familiar with this subject matter. She made her feature directorial debut in 2018 with the breakout Sundance film Dead Pigs, then jumped into the world of superheroes and DC Comics to direct 2020’s Birds of Prey. The Gallerist marks Yan’s return to non-IP-based filmmaking. “It’s hard to define what inherent value is in the art world, and so much of it becomes in the eye of the beholder—and also in the stories that are told about it, in the context and the marketing,” she says. “I always found the collision of the business and the art itself to be absolutely fascinating.”

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    Rebecca Ford

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  • The 16 Films and TV Shows We’re Most Excited to See at Sundance 2026

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    Courtesy of A24.

    The Moment

    A.k.a. Charli xcx’s hyperpop mockumentary, helmed by the most in-demand creative director in music right now: Aidan Zamiri, channeling Charli’s humor for a satirical take on the music industry. Set to be released by A24 at the end of the month, the film includes appearances by everyone from Rachel Sennott to Kylie Jenner to Alexander Skarsgård. The trailer is funny, there’s no bigger star than Charli in pop music right now, and she’s also a noted film buff—so expectations are high for this film. Let’s hope it delivers during its premiere Friday night.

    The Musical

    A recently dumped middle school theater teacher puts together an avant-garde original musical in secret as a way to exact revenge on the school’s principal, who is dating his ex-girlfriend. This dark comedy from first-time feature director Giselle Bonilla, with a script by Alexander Heller—in the vein of Summer Heights High, but not filmed as a mockumentary—has a wild reveal at the end, when the audience gets to see the musical performed onstage, embracing the role of spite in the creation of art.

    See You When I See You

    One of the kings of Sundance, Jay Duplass, returns to Park City with a new film that follows a writer coping with PTSD after the death of his sister. Based on Adam Cayton-Holland’s memoir, Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-comic Memoir, the film also stars two more Sundance darlings, Cooper Raiff and Kaitlyn Dever. Duplass has done a lot of acting work in recent years, and he’s always showing up as a producer on independent films—but this movie marks his return to the festival as a director.

    The Shitheads

    Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr. star in Macon Blair’s Sundance follow-up to I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore. Blair won the festival’s US Dramatic grand jury prize for that film in 2017. Here, Franco and Jackson Jr. play drivers trying to transport a rich teenager, played by Mason Thames, to rehab. This job proves harder than expected, and things get out of hand quickly as the trio goes on an adventure that includes run-ins with supporting cast members Kiernan Shipka and Nicholas Braun.

    Undertone

    Is it even Sundance without an A24 horror film premiere? In writer-director Ian Tuason’s debut feature, the host of a podcast focused on paranormal activity begins to receive recordings of a haunted nature. This one has all the signature A24 horror tropes—an unsettling tone, a female protagonist struggling with depression and loneliness, and a Sundance midnight premiere.

    Worried

    This television series, with a pilot directed by Nicole Holofcener and written by Lesley Arfin and Alexandra Tanner, is entering the festival without a network or streamer to call home. Centered around two young women, played by Gideon Adlon (yes, she’s Odessa A’zion’s sister) and Rachel Kaly, the show is giving Girls vibes. Holofcener rarely misses; it’s also interesting to see a television series take an independent-film model and look for distribution at a film festival.

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    John Ross

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