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Tag: Sundance Film Festival

  • Celebrating the Power of Film and the Best of Humanity at Park City’s Last Sundance

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    The Friend’s House Is Here was covertly filmed in the streets of Tehran amidst violent government crackdowns against citizens. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

    There is a scene about halfway through first-time writer-director Stephanie Ahn’s romantic drama Bedford Park—which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition in last week’s Sundance Film Festival—where the lead characters are stuck in New Jersey traffic, fiddling with the radio. “Keep it here,” says reluctant passenger Eli (South Korean actor Son Suk-ku) when he hears Bill Conti’s Rocky theme Gonna Fly Now. While Eli—whose cauliflower ears speak to his high school wrestling days and whose furtive and combative manner suggests he has never stopped fighting—bobs his head and shakes his fists, Irene (a devastating Moon Choi), an on-leave physical therapist in an emotional free fall, stares ahead, saying nothing, her eyes silently filling with tears.

    Sitting in a Press & Industry screening at the Holiday Village Theaters in Park City, so did mine. Of course, it had much to do with the authenticity and masterfully observational patience of Ahn’s film. But the film served as a powerful metaphor for the festival itself, which was also uniting a bunch of broken people around their shared and largely nostalgic love of movies. A dense cloud of wistfulness threatened to overtake the festival every time audiences watched Robert Redford, its late founder and spiritual guide, reflect on the power of storytelling in gauzy footage projected onscreen.

    While Bedford Park was my favorite film I saw at the festival, it didn’t pick up one of the big awards. (Beth de Araújo’s Channing Tatum–starring drama about an 8-year-old crime witness Josephine swept both the Jury and Audience awards, while Bedford Park received a Special Jury Award for Debut Feature.)

    What Ahn’s film brought home instead was something even more valuable: a distribution deal. Sony Pictures Classics—whose co-presidents and founders Michael Barker and Tom Bernard were battling for good movies and ethical distribution against the indie movie dark lord Harvey Weinstein back in Sundance’s buy-happy ’90s heyday—made the film its second acquisition of the festival behind director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s crowd-pleasing Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! It was an anachronistically bullish stand by the 34-year-old specialty arm in what has been a largely bearish acquisition market.

    The relatively quiet marketplace, Redford’s passing and the immutability of 2026 being the end of the festival’s Utah run (Main Street’s iconic Egyptian Theater being unavailable for festival programming felt like a don’t-let-the-door-hit-you statement from both city and state) combined to give this outing a bit of a Dance of Death feeling. Respite from this sense of gloom came from the most unlikely of places: documentaries on seemingly depressing topics.

    A man with a close-cropped haircut holds two telephone receivers to his ears, smiling slightly while seated on a patterned couch.A man with a close-cropped haircut holds two telephone receivers to his ears, smiling slightly while seated on a patterned couch.
    Joybubbles in his living room. Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

    Joybubbles, the effervescent directorial debut from longtime archival producer Rachael J. Morrison, tells the story of Joe Engrassia, a man who copes with his blindness and the cruelty he experiences as a result of his visual impairment through his relationship with that great relic of the 20th Century: the telephone. As a child, he found comfort in its steady tone when his parents fought; as a young man, he learned to manipulate its system to make calls across the world with his pitch-perfect whistling; as an adult, he entertains strangers through a prerecorded “fun line,” telling jokes and stories from his life. In one scene, Morrison captures a caller recollecting taking Joe—who late in life legally changed his name to Joybubbles to reflect his commitment to living life as a child—to Penny Marshall’s 1988 movie Big, and describing it to him in the back of the theater; the moment moved me as deeply as the Rocky interlude from Bedford Park.

    The setup of Sam Green’s The Oldest Person in the World seems high concept: a globe-spanning chronicle of the various holders of that dubious Guinness World Record title over the course of a decade. But in the hands of Green, a Sundance vet who has premiered a dozen films at the festival dating back to 1997, what would be rote instead blossoms into a consistently surprising, deeply personal and strangely exhilarating exploration of what it means to be alive.

    A glossy, cartoonish glass pitcher with a smiling face sits onstage under bright colored lights, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers at a tech conference.A glossy, cartoonish glass pitcher with a smiling face sits onstage under bright colored lights, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers at a tech conference.
    Ghost in the Machine delivers a thought-provoking takedown of Techno-Fascism. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

    Ghost in the Machine, Valerie Vatach’s exploration of the eugenicist roots and colonial and anti-environmental reality of the A.I. arms race, had the exact opposite effect. It tells the tale of a society that has lost its moral and humanitarian bearing at the behest of techno-oligarchs, amalgamating our own labor to keep us divided. The film’s denouement—showing ways we as a society can still fight back—was the only unconvincing part of Vatach’s film essay.

    Meanwhile, the miles-deep societal pessimism of Ghost in the Machine was being tragically echoed by real events. Indeed, the most shocking and vital clip of the weekend was the footage of the Minneapolis murder of protester and ICU nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents that festivalgoers watched on their phones in stunned silence while waiting in lines. A day earlier, U.S. Congressman Max Frost was physically assaulted at the festival in an attack that was both politically and racially motivated.

    It all made for a tense mood for one of the more anxious events of the festival: that Sunday’s premiere of Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, from Alex Gibney, another longtime Sundance veteran. Culled from footage shot by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Rushdie’s wife) of the novelist’s recovery from the 2022 attack on his life and adapted from his memoir of that event, the film was most effective when Gibney recounted the since-rescinded 1989 fatwa against Rushdie, an example of, as the author told the theater audience, “how violence unleashed by an irresponsible leader can spread out of control.” (Security measures for the event included a full pat-down, metal detectors, and bomb-sniffing dogs.)

    As trenchant as it felt in that moment, Knife was also an example of a documentary where the subject may have been a bit too in control of the final product; in addition to providing the footage, Griffiths served as executive producer and Gibney was her and Rushdie’s handpicked director.

    American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez, which premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition and took home the Audience Award, also drifted toward hagiography. But in telling the story of Valdez, the Chicano arts trailblazer who founded El Teatro Campesino to inform and entertain newly unionized farmworkers, the film powerfully demonstrates how politically and socially engaged arts serve both as a morale booster and a clarion call in the fight against oppression.

    Nowhere was this idea better expressed than in my second favorite fiction film in the festival: The Friend’s House Is Here. Directed by the New York–based husband and wife team of Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei and covertly filmed in the streets of Tehran amidst violent government crackdowns against citizens, House is at its heart a joyful “hangout” movie about two close but very different friends pushing the limits of their creative expression in current-day Iran. The film—whose cast includes Iranian Instagram star Hana Mana, theater actor Mahshad Bahraminejad, and a troupe of actors from a local improvisational theater company—rightfully took home the Special Jury Award for its ensemble cast.

    A young girl and a man recline in sunlit beach chairs beside dry grass and driftwood, both with their eyes closed in quiet rest.A young girl and a man recline in sunlit beach chairs beside dry grass and driftwood, both with their eyes closed in quiet rest.
    Maria Petrova in Myrsini Aristidou’s Hold Onto Me. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

    Aside from The Friend’s House Is Here crew, the best performances in Sundance films were given by children. This includes Maria Petrova as a dour 11-year-old beach rat reconnecting with her estranged conman father in Myrsini Aristidou’s Hold Onto Me, which won the World Cinema-Dramatic Audience Award. Mason Reeves’ complex and nervy turn as an 8-year-old who witnesses a rape in Golden Gate Park during an early morning run with her fitness-obsessed dad (Channing Tatum) is by far the best thing about Josephine, writer-director Beth de Araújo’s multiple award winner; the film’s narrative and emotional force are deeply undercut by the abject cluelessness shown by the child’s parents, played by Channing Tatum and Eternals stunner Gemma Chan.

    Not all of the films at this year’s festival were engaged with our fraught political moment. Longtime Sundance mainstay Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex (the programmers’ fixation on inviting old hands felt like a combination of sentimentality and branding) was born of the kind of sassy, candy-colored provocations the director helped pioneer in the 90s in its telling of Cooper Hoffman’s art intern embarking on a Dom/Sub relationship with his boss, played with preening relish by Olivia Wilde.

    A man on the left and a woman on the right gaze into each other's eyesA man on the left and a woman on the right gaze into each other's eyes
    Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde in Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Lacey Terrell

    Along with her Sex costar Charli XCX, whose premiere of her mockumentary The Moment created the closest thing the 2026 fest had to a media scrum, Wilde became the celebrity face of the festival. The bidding war to acquire The Invite—the middle-age sex comedy she directed and stars in alongside Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz—was eventually won by A24 and provided one of the few pieces of red meat that kept the trade reporters engaged.

    Otherwise, the festival overall seemed much more focused on its past than its present or even its future. (That said, Colorado Governor Jared Polis showing up to premieres in his trademark cowboy hat—in anticipation of Sundance’s move next year to Boulder—did feel like the ultimate Rocky Mountain flex.)

    In addition to its reliance on programming new films by filmmakers who had movies in previous festivals, this year’s festival also featured special screenings of films from its illustrious past, among them Barbara Kopple’s American Dream, Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, and James Wan’s Saw. Still, the festival’s most potent dose of uncut nostalgia was Tamra Davis’ The Best Summer. A stitched-together chronicle of a 1994 Australian indie rock festival that featured the Beastie Boys, Bikini Kill, Pavement, Foo Fighters and Sonic Youth, Davis’ film felt like the ultimate in Gen X hipster home movies.

    But did all of this chronic looking backwards sap the festival of its vitality? Maybe a little. But despite the sentimentality that covered Park City more heartily than the snow, films like The Friend’s House Is Here reminded us how remarkable good films can be at discovering and celebrating humanity, even as Ghost in the Machine showed us that the moment to do something about it may have passed.

    More from Sundance

    Celebrating the Power of Film and the Best of Humanity at Park City’s Last Sundance

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    Oliver Jones

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  • MetFilm Boards Sundance Awards Winner ‘To Hold a Mountain’ for International Sales (EXCLUSIVE)

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    MetFilm Sales has acquired international sales rights to Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić’s feature documentary “To Hold a Mountain,” which recently received its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was awarded the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize.

    MFS will present the title to international buyers for the first time at the EFM in Berlin, and co-reps the title alongside Submarine Entertainment.

    Set in the remote highlands of Montenegro, the film tells the story of a shepherd mother and her daughter who proudly defend their ancestral mountain from the threat of becoming a NATO military training ground, stirring memories of past violence that once shattered their family.

    In his Variety review, Murtada Elfadl wrote, “Reveals itself as an emotionally shattering meditation on grief and perseverance. Gorgeously shot with a quiet, deliberate rhythm, it’s the kind of film that entrances its audience without them noticing. Only at the end does the audience fully grasp the magnitude of the story it chronicles and the natural beauty of the images they have been witnessing all along.”

    The director of photography is Eva Kraljević and the editor is George Cragg, with additional editing by Catherine Rascon. The original score is by Draško Adzić.

    The producers are Tutorov, Glomazić, Quentin Laurent and Rok Biček. It is executive produced by Megan Gelstein, Andrea Meditch, Bianca Oana, Jean Tsien and Petra Costa. The executive producers for Points North Institute are Sean Flynn, Ben Fowlie and Lucila Moctezuma, and Chandra Jessee and Rebecca Lichtenfeld for InMaat. The executive producers for Doc Society are Megha Agrawal Sood and Shanida Scotland. Meadow Fund also exec produces.

    “To Hold a Mountain” is a Wake Up Films Production in co-production with Les Films de l’Oeil Sauvage, Ardor Films and Cvinger Film.

    MFS’s current slate includes Ross McElwee’s “Remake,” which won the Golden Globe Impact Prize for Documentary at the Venice Film Festival, and Brydie O’Connor’s “Barbara Forever,” which recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, winning the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Prize.

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    Leo Barraclough

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  • ‘Rock Springs’ Review: Kelly Marie Tran and Benedict Wong in a Fresh, Vivid Spin on Grief Horror

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    After the death of her husband, Emily (Kelly Marie Tran) doesn’t know what to do. Her daughter Gracie (Aria Kim) hasn’t spoken in the six months since her father’s passing, and seems to be withdrawing more and more every day. Her mother-in-law, Nai Nai (Fiona Fu), copes with her son’s death through traditional Chinese spirituality, which she shares with her granddaughter. But Emily is Vietnamese and doesn’t speak the language. It’s just now that her husband is gone that Emily is forced to confront the cultural gap between her and those closest to her. Only showing her grief privately, Emily emotionally isolates herself, hoping that pushing forward will heal all the pain. But starting over in Rock Springs, Wyoming, proves to be more difficult than she could have ever anticipated. 

    Nai Nai warned against moving during “Ghost Week”, a time when the barrier between the spirit world and our world comes down. In Chinese culture, the mourning families must pray for their departed loved ones, guiding their souls to peace in the afterlife. Mourning is communal, and as families share their grief, they’re supposed to find healing together. But Nai Nai also warns Gracie about “Hungry Ghosts”, those who die scared and alone with no family members to guide them home.

    Rock Springs

    The Bottom Line

    A big swing that pays off.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Midnight)
    Cast: Kelly Marie Tran, Benedict Wong, Jimmy O. Yang, Aria Kim, Fiona Fu, Ricky He, Cardi Wong
    Director/Writer: Vera Miao

    1 hour 37 minutes

    When Gracie steals an old doll from a garage sale, it puts her in contact with a spirit she hopes is her father. But writer and director Vera Miao has other plans, using Gracie and her family to tell a multi-generational story of racism, grief and trauma. When Gracie disappears into the woods, past and present collide as she comes face to face with the spirits of dead miners. And what began as a small tale expands to become a confrontation with generational sadness and spiritual unrest.

    In 1885, on the same land where Emily chose to restart her life with her family, a tragedy occurred. A village of Chinese migrant men was massacred and their homes destroyed. At least 28 Chinese miners were killed that day, with other sources indicating a death toll of 40 or 50 people. Only 15 survived with injuries at the hands of angry white settlers who resented that the local mining company had employed them in the first place. These settlers were never prosecuted for what is now known as the worst mass shooting in Wyoming history. To many viewers, this film will be an introduction to this historic tragedy. 

    Miao takes us back to that day, showing us a tight-knit group of miners with Ah Tseng (Benedict Wong) and He Yew (Jimmy O. Yang) at the center. Before the attacks begin, they discuss their homeland and new identity as Americans. Though Ah Tseng has been in the country longer — having worked on the railroads — he seems to doubt the idea that the United States could really be called home. The murderous white settlers only solidify his doubt before his untimely death. The fallen men are piled into a mass grave in the woods right outside Emily’s new house.

    Cinematographer Heyjin Jun cuts through the sadness with breathtaking images of forest and landscape, showcasing the beautiful land spoiled by blood and hate. Tran gives a compelling performance as a young widow adjusting to single parenthood and suddenly being the head of her household. Since her breakout performance in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Tran has struggled to find meaningful roles that allow her to show her range. But she excels here as a woman haunted by her husband’s death and afraid to embrace the traditions that give her daughter comfort. She has great chemistry with newcomer Kim, a gifted young actress who manages to be expressive while rarely uttering a single word.

    Rock Springs is a big swing from Miao that pays off in the end, blending drama, horror and ugly American history to create a truly heartbreaking and hopefully healing experience.

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    Jon Frosch

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  • A Farewell to the Sundance Film Festival—and Park City

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    It’s true, the 2026 Sundance Film Festival hasn’t wrapped up quite yet. In-person screenings continue through February 1, and the fest won’t hand out its awards until January 30. But the crazed flurry of the event’s first weekend is in the rearview mirror—and now that its biggest titles have started to be snatched up by distributors, it’s time to take stock of what we saw, what we liked, and yes, what we didn’t.

    This week on Little Gold Men, John Ross, Rebecca Ford, and Hillary Busis chat about Sundance’s ups and downs: the narrative films that earned the biggest ovations, the docs that might have a bright future next awards season, and the reasons why we frankly are not overly upset about the festival moving from Park City, Utah to Boulder, Colorado next year. (Short answer: the food situation. Long answer: you’ll need to listen to find out.)

    Throughout the conversation, a few themes emerge. Charli xcx, who had not two but three films at the fest this year, might be the queen of Sundance—unless the title belongs to Olivia Wilde, who starred in two films there and directed one. The latter, a pitch-black comedy called The Invite, sparked a three-day bidding war that ended with A24 acquiring the film, reportedly for upward of $10 million. Sundance’s slate this year was filled with raunchy comedies, typically timely documentaries, and at least one star-studded ensemble film that met a more negative reception than its creators were hoping for. The group also talks about how the event unfolded even as the real world intruded on the festival bubble, in the form of both news about Minnesota and a violent incident at Sundance itself.

    Listen below for our full Sundance report, as well as a masterclass on awards show fashion from VF style correspondent José Criales-Unzueta

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    Hillary Busis

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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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  • ‘Chasing Summer’ Review: Iliza Shlesinger Captures Both the Pitfalls and Temptations in an Overachiever’s Humiliating Return Home

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    Texas is a big place that can feel so small sometimes. Just ask comedian Iliza Shlesinger, who clearly gets it. Born in New York, but raised in the suburbs of Dallas Fort Worth, she made her break from the Lone Star State right after high school and never looked back. Well, that part’s not quite true. Her hilarious, perceptive and deeply relatable indie comedy “Chasing Summer” (directed by Josephine Decker) is all about looking back, as her overachieving character Jaime returns “home” after nearly 20 years away to make peace with her past.

    No one questions when men do what Jaime did, ditching their families (in this case, MVP Megan Mullaly as her well-mannered mama Layanne and Jeff Perry as her more oblivious dad) to go off and make a career for themselves. As the film opens, Jaime is out saving the world — that’s literally her job, as a disaster relief worker — cleaning up after a tornado in neighboring Mississippi. Without calling attention to it, Decker shoots the scene like she’s got something to prove (when it’s Jaime who’s the one with a chip on her shoulder), swooping through the aid camp in an elaborate, “Touch of Evil”-style oner.

    Jaime has just gotten news that her team has been picked to serve in Jakarta next (the “Nobel Prize” of such assignments, she explains), and right after the cut, she receives another shocker: Her boyfriend’s dumping her for a younger woman. They’ve already packed up her stuff. It wasn’t her plan to detour through Dallas and see her folks — Jaime’s been doing her best to avoid them for almost two decades — but now she needs a place to stay.

    So begins a familiar “you can’t go home again” story (till now, Reese Witherspoon had a corner on the market) that miraculously doesn’t feel like we’ve heard it before, even if the moral is perfectly clear from the get-go. Something embarrassing happened between Jaime and her teenage crush, Chase (“Smallville” star Tom Welling, to whom time has been kind). She’s been running ever since, never staying in one place for long. Coming back, she’s almost immediately reminded of Chase. He sure has changed, but has Jaime?

    Not according to a trio of popular girls from her high school class, whom she runs into at the grocery store. They swear she looks the same. Extrapolating from the way Jaime rides a shopping cart (like a 10-year-old, zooming through the frozen goods section with both feet off the ground), these grocery aisles are like memory lane. Practically everyone she encounters speaks to her with politeness and respect, though none — not even her mom — seem to recognize or care what she’s accomplished career-wise.

    “Your nails are scraggly from all that volunteering,” scolds Layanne in her articulate Southern drawl — except Jaime doesn’t volunteer, and her mom’s never understood that. She can’t even keep the places Jaime’s served straight. Being back under her childhood roof is stressful, but not nearly as much as sleeping in tents halfway around the world — or so you’d think. Shlesinger does an excellent job of communicating Jaime’s anxiety (sometimes it feels like she’s playing to the camera, ready to break the fourth wall with a “can you believe these people?” shrug). But we believe that’s the character. Jaime has spent half her life watching herself from a self-conscious remove.

    If she’s running from anything, it’s herself, not Chase. Her ex long since moved on with his life: settled down, gotten married, had kids. In Texas, as in most of the country, the majority of folks don’t drift far from home. Jaime’s the exception. She convinced herself she was escaping judgment — cruel rumors that trace back to high school. But that strange mix of nostalgia and ridicule Shlesinger’s script shows for certain Texas customs (big hair, oversized pickup trucks and bladder-challenging beverage containers)? The judgment stems from her/Jaime.

    “Nobody’s thinking about high school anymore,” Chase says when he runs into Jaime at the roller-skating rink run by her screw-up of an older sister (Cassidy Freeman). Jaime agrees to help out around the place, but it’s hard not to get pulled back into old patterns. Despite all those years away, Jaime essentially reverts back to her teenage self, accompanying the much-younger Harper (Lola Tung) to a kegger, where she meets a kid, Colby (Garrett Wareing, who comes across like a conscientious quarterback). He’s barely half her age, but more considerate than all her exes combined, so she allows herself to be loved.

    Jaime has a lot of sorting out to do while in Texas, and Shlesinger generously allows her character to fumble through it. She’s been responsible for so long, obviously trying to prove herself to people who haven’t given her much thought. That’s a rude awakening plenty of people experience at their high school reunions: The bullies have mellowed, forgetting and/or forgiving themselves for their behavior, while the underdogs go on to become overachievers. Colby explains as much. (He’s handsome, which makes it easy to be aloof. But he’s wise enough to recognize that caring what others think is a curse that people impose on themselves.)

    There’s real wisdom to “Chasing Summer,” which Shlesinger and Decker offset with a handful of steamier-than-you’d-expect sex scenes. Jaime resists Colby at first — not for long, really — after which, their physical interplay is presented with her pleasure as the priority. That’s the one element in which audiences might recognize Decker’s hand. Otherwise, the movie bears almost no resemblance to her past work (“Butter on the Latch,” “Shirley,” “Madeline’s Madeline”). Compared to those low-budget marvels, “Chasing Summer” shows all the polish and soul of those glossy studio comedies that result when Judd Apatow picks a comedian and builds an entire project around them. He wasn’t involved here, but the movie still ranks right up there with “Trainwreck,” even giving “Bridesmaids” vibes at times.

    You needn’t know Texas to see the truth in it, but if you do, the details certainly add to the experience. Like Mullaly’s jewelry and accent. Or the mercurial weather, which has driven so many from the state. Or the way that coming back is the best way to move forward.

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    Peter Debruge

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  • Sundance Film Festival saying goodbye to Park City, Utah

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    After more than 40 years, the Sundance Film Festival is leaving its longtime host of Park City, Utah, and heading to Boulder, Colorado. Sarah Horbacewicz reports.

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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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  • Rep. Maxwell Frost says he was assaulted at Sundance Film Festival

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    Rep. Maxwell Frost said Saturday that he was assaulted at the Sundance Film Festival, linking to a news article describing a hate crime at a party for the film festival. 

    “Last night, I was assaulted by a man at Sundance Festival who told me that Trump was going to deport me before he punched me in the face,” Frost posted on social media. “He was heard screaming racist remarks as he drunkenly ran off. The individual was arrested and I am okay.”

    Frost, a Florida Democrat, linked to a Variety story about the alleged incident, which said a party crasher allegedly “punched a person of color in the face” after telling people in the restroom that he is proud to be “white.”

    Security then intervened and detained the man, according to Variety.

    The Park City police department did respond to CBS News’s request for comment. 

    Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries posted on social media on Saturday that he was “horrified by the attack” and he was “appalled that this terrifying assault took place.” 

     “The perpetrator must be aggressively prosecuted,” Jeffries wrote. “Hate and political violence has no place in our country, and the entire House Democratic Caucus family stands with Maxwell.”

    The Sundance Film Festival, which began on Jan. 22 and runs through Feb. 1, is being held in Park City, Utah, for the final time, with next year’s festival set to be held in Boulder, Colorado.

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  • Chase Sui Wonders Teases ‘The Studio’ Season 2 Is “Pushing The Needle” A Week Into Filming

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    With production on Season 2 of The Studio officially underway and Hollywood going through a rollercoaster of changes, the industry can expect many more laughs at its expense.

    Chase Sui Wonders, who plays junior studio exec Quinn Hackett in the Apple TV+ series, teased to Deadline that co-creators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg “are definitely pushing the needle” with the sophomore season of their Golden Globe-winning satire.

    “It’s definitely a level up,” she said at Sundance Film Festival. “We’ve already started filming, and I think everyone is laughing harder and louder than they did last season, even in our first week.”

    Related Stories

    Wonders continued, “I can’t say much, but there are some familiar faces that you’ll be very excited to see making fun of themselves.”

    After the show won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series — Musical or Comedy this month, as well as Best Actor for Rogen, he told press there were “a few people we roped in tonight” for cameos, adding, “This is a good poaching ground for us.”

    The Studio

    (L-R) Chase Sui Wonders, Seth Rogen, Kathryn Hahn and Ike Barinholtz in ‘The Studio’

    Apple TV

    “Several things happened today and leading up to this event that we’ve written directly into the show,” noted Rogen, adding that production would begin the following week.

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    Glenn Garner

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  • Robert Redford remembered for his mentorship of new filmmakers at Sundance gala

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    PARK CITY, Utah — Filmmakers and actors whose careers were shaped by Robert Redford and the Sundance Institute he founded reflected on his legacy as the godfather of independent cinema at a star-studded gala Friday night during the first Sundance Film Festival since his death.

    The 2026 festival — its last in Utah, before relocating to Boulder, Colorado — is a love letter to the haven Redford established in the state decades ago for stories that didn’t fit into the mainstream.

    Even as the festival heads to its new home, the piece of Redford’s legacy that his daughter said meant the most to him will remain in Utah: the institute’s lab programs for writers and directors.

    “When my dad could have created an empire, he created a nest,” said his daughter, Amy Redford. “The Sundance Institute was designed to support and protect and nourish and then set free.”

    She said there was no place her father would rather be than sitting with a new filmmaker at the Sundance Mountain Resort he founded, about 34 miles (54 kilometers) south of Park City.

    The labs, which started in 1981, bring emerging storytellers to the rustic resort in northern Utah to nurture their talents under expert guidance and away from the hustle and bustle of Hollywood. Three of the five best director nominees at this year’s Academy Awards — Paul Thomas Anderson, Chloé Zhao and Ryan Coogler — came up through the labs.

    Zhao, whose film “Hamnet” was nominated this week for eight Oscars, credited the screenwriting lab with jump-starting her career in 2012. Under the mentorship of Redford and program director Michelle Satter, she said she learned to trust her own vision and gained an invaluable community of creatives.

    Other former participants, including director Nia DaCosta, shared memories of Redford riding his motorcycle on peaceful wooded paths and stopping to talk to them about their projects. He insisted each of them call him by his nickname, Bob.

    “I remember once seeing him walk some of the other fellows from the directors lab, and he just looked so full of love and pride for us, for what he built,” DaCosta said. “And it was just very clear to me in that moment the depth to which he cared about this place and all of us.”

    Sundance Film Festival regular Ethan Hawke recounted his first audition in front of Redford for the 1992 period drama “A River Runs Through It.” After forgoing sleep to prepare a lengthy monologue, Hawke said Redford pulled him aside to say he was too young for the part but would undoubtedly have a wonderful career.

    Redford was an early champion of Hawke’s work and became one of his greatest mentors. Hawke pledged Friday to “keep the fire that he started burning” and help it spread.

    Screenings at this year’s festival were preceded by a short video tribute to Redford, which was repeatedly met with thunderous applause. Many volunteers wore buttons that read “Thank you Bob!”

    Later in the festival will be a screening of his first truly independent film, the 1969 sports drama “Downhill Racer.”

    Filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s first taste of Sundance was as a publicist for other artists at the festival. In 2012, she got her own big break at Sundance with “Middle of Nowhere.” She later spent several years as a Sundance trustee and grew close to Redford, though she said she never felt quite right calling him Bob.

    “Mr. Redford didn’t just establish a festival. He modeled a way to be, a way that matters, a way that says artists matter, that imagination is worth protecting,” DuVernay said. “The door that he built is still open, and it’s up to us to walk through and to maybe even build our own.”

    For the first and likely the only time, she then said, “Thank you, Bob.”

    ___

    For more coverage of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/sundance-film-festival

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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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  • Dildos, Ball Gags and Threesomes: Kinky Olivia Wilde Thriller ‘I Want Your Sex’ Heats Up Sundance

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    “I Want Your Sex,” an erotic thriller starring Olivia Wilde as a sexually assured artist who embarks on a sadomasochistic relationship with her gallery assistant, got Sundance’s pulse racing on Friday night. Cooper Hoffman plays Elliot, the sub to Wilde’s dom in Gregg Araki’s latest piece of boundary-pushing provocation, one that Sundance programming director Kim Yutani dubbed a “return to form” for the filmmaker in her introductory remarks.

    Both stars go for it — baring all in a relationship that is kinky, but also tender at times. Not in a conventional way, of course. Wilde’s character, Erika Tracy, opens a sexual Pandora’s box for Hoffman, one that comes with ball gags, stilettos, whips, chains, and a cornucopia of dildos and strap-ons. There’s even a disastrous threesome that goes comically off the rails.

    When Araki heard that Wilde was interested in playing Erika, he made it clear what would be required.

    “We had a meeting, and I just said, ‘you know, to do this part, you gotta just not give a fuck, and just want to just fucking take the plunge,’” Araki recalled during a post-screening Q&A. “‘Because I don’t want to compromise it. I don’t want to water it down.’ And she said, ‘Let’s go.’”

    Wilde said she never looked back after signing up to play the role of an artist whose swagger masks her dwindling self-confidence.

    “I was just so excited by Gregg’s enthusiasm for the medium, for the process,” Wilde said. “I wish more people made movies like [Gregg]. You just said, ‘Let’s do it. Let’s get cool people together who want to tell a story, and let’s just do it. And it doesn’t have to be a whole thing, and it doesn’t have to feel like this corporate project. It has to just come from the heart.’ And I wanted to be a part of something like that.”

    Hoffman, who turned heads in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza,” wasn’t sure he was right for the part of a bumbling boy toy. Araki was drawn to Hoffman because he reminded him of Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate” and thought he could bring the same nebbish intensity to the part.

    “I honestly didn’t think I’d get cast,” Hoffman admitted. “I just threw my hat in the ring and kept getting closer and closer. And then they said I got the job. And I was like, ‘Ah, shit. I gotta go do this.’ And I’m very happy I did.”

    On the red carpet prior to the premiere, Wilde told Variety that Gen Z wants to see less sex in movies and TV because they “don’t want to see inauthenticity anymore.”

    “The way that sex has been portrayed in film for a long time hasn’t been particularly realistic,” Wilde said.

    That may not be a critique that’s leveled at Araki and company. The nudity and S&M mean “I Want Your Sex” will push the R-rating to the breaking point, but it was the film’s heart that the cast kept emphasizing on stage.

    “Ultimately, the sex feels secondary,” Chase Sui Wonders, who plays Hoffman’s best friend and roommate, said. “It’s a story about being obsessed with someone…It’s just a tragic love story.”

    Mason Gooding, Daveed Diggs and Charli xcx round out the ensemble. Black Bear produced the film, which is looking for distribution. The packed auditorium included executives from indie labels like Magnolia, Roadside and Mubi, and the room was so crowded that Patrick Schwarzenegger was spotted walking up and down the aisle looking for an empty seat.

    “I Want Your Sex” is Araki’s eleventh feature at Sundance, with the director having previously debuted the likes of “Mysterious Skin” and “The Doom Generation” at the mountain festival. Before the film screened, Araki praised Sundance founder Robert Redford, who died last year at the age of 89.

    “There’s been nobody in the history of fucking Hollywood movies who says, ‘I want to use my fucking incredible star power and all my fucking clout to create this place in the world for those fucking weird filmmakers, those outsider filmmakers, those different voices,” Araki said. “It’s all about DEI.”

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    Varietybrentlang

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  • Channing Tatum, Olivia Wilde and Charli xcx arrive at Sundance Film Festival for premieres

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    PARK CITY, Utah — The Sundance Film Festival is in full swing, with Channing Tatum, Olivia Wilde and Charli xcx movies premiering back-to-back at the storied Eccles Theatre Friday evening in Park City, Utah. Considered some of the hottest tickets at the festival, the waitlists are already long, and the lines will surely be longer.

    First up is “Josephine,” writer-director Beth De Araújo’s raw drama about an 8-year-old girl (Mason Reeves) whose life and sense of safety is upended after she witnesses a crime in Golden Gate Park. Tatum and Gemma Chan play the parents who are unsure how to help her navigate these new emotions and fears. The film, which is part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition, is based on De Araújo’s own experience of seeing something scarring at that age.

    The next film, Gregg Araki’s “I Want Your Sex,” will bring a distinct change in tone to the Eccles. It’s the story of a college graduate in his early 20s (played by Cooper Hoffman ) who gets his first job as a kind of intern/assistant to a renowned art world provocateur named Erika Tracy (Wilde), who Arkai described as “bold, daring and very controversial,” a cross between Robert Mapplethorpe and Madonna.

    “It’s the story of their affairs and the impact it has on this kid’s life and how it kind of turns his whole world upside down,” Araki told The Associated Press. “It’s fun, it’s colorful, it’s sexy. And it’s a ride.”

    It’s a film that Araki has been working on for over 10 years, as it evolved from a comic “Fifty Shades of Grey” with a female intern to what it is now.

    “After #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein, all the stuff that was going on, it was literally like, I don’t really want to see a woman getting dragged around by the hair,” Araki said. “I don’t want to seed that kind of patriarchal dynamic, even if it’s consensual.”

    Flipping the gender roles and making the young intern a man made the movie more interesting for Araki, “as a filmmaker who has always been heavily influenced by feminist film theory and feminism in general,” he said.

    At the same time, he was absorbing news stories about Gen Z and how they don’t have sex or relationships anymore and a new dynamic emerged.

    “What I knew as an old person, as an old-timer, in terms of socialization, dating, sex, all of this stuff that seemed to be kind of falling away,” Araki said. “And so that kind of became a major theme of the movie.”

    Things Wilde’s character says are things he has also said in interviews about sex and sexuality. Her character gets into generational debates about it. And ultimately it’s sex positive.

    “It was very important to me to make something sex positive,” Araki said. “’I Want Your Sex’ is like the opposite of ‘Babygirl,’ which I found to be very sex negative.”

    The film also features a supporting turn from Charli xcx, who was a fan of Araki and whose “Brat” album cover was partially inspired by the title credits to his film “Smiley Face.” When she heard about this new movie, he said, she asked if she could be in it. He was interested, but told her agent that she needed to do a self-tape “like everyone else” to play the part of Hoffman’s girlfriend.

    “The character is not her. That’s what’s so fun,” he said. “She’s American, she’s super uptight and kind of pill.”

    She filmed her scenes in one day, on a two-day break in the middle of her Brat tour.

    “I don’t want to give it away, but she’s in one of my favorite scenes in the whole movie where her and Cooper’s character are having kind of bad sex,” he said.

    Those who stick around at the Eccles after “I Want Your Sex” will get a Charli xcx double feature, with the world premiere of her self-referential mockumentary “The Moment,” about a rising pop star, before it hits theaters on Jan. 30.

    Earlier Friday, the world premiere of William David Caballero’s mixed-media film “TheyDream” immersed viewers in the intimate story of a Puerto Rican family learning to process grief through art. Caballero and cowriter Elaine Del Valle have screened short films at Sundance in the past but were honored to bring a full-length feature to the festival.

    “Sundance has always been about possibility for me — about artists being given space to take creative risks and tell personal stories,” Del Valle, who is also a producer on the film, told the AP. “Bringing our first feature, especially in Sundance’s final year in Utah, carries a different weight.”

    ___

    Associated Press writer Hannah Schoenbaum contributed to this story.

    ___

    For more coverage of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/sundance-film-festival

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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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  • ‘Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!’ Review: Japanese Comedy-Drama Dances Through Grief With Heart & Absurd Whimsy — Sundance Film Festival

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    In Josef Kubota Wladyka‘s Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!, the co-writer/director tells a beautifully relatable story of life, love and loss with some Fosse-quality dance numbers and just the right amount of whimsy.

    Set in Tokyo, the comedy-drama follows Haru (Rinko Kikuchi) after her happy life with husband and dance partner Luis (Alejandro Edda) comes to a halt when he dies suddenly in the middle of a ballroom competition.

    After nine months, Haru is in self-imposed isolation until her friends Yuki (Yoh Yoshida) and Hiro (YOU) drag her out of the house and to a dance class, where she’s immediately smitten with her instructor Fedir (Alberto Guerra) — an impromptu dance number breaking out to humorously emphasize the character’s reconnection with life, one of a few.

    Hiring Fedir for private lessons, Haru soon learns that he’s in an open marriage with his own dance partner. Uninterested in the concept of non-monogamy, she plays along and lies that she has an arrangement with her husband, whom she says is still alive. A brief but passionate fling ensues between the pair, before Fedir’s wife sparks some deliciously unpredictable jealousy in Haru.

    Meanwhile, Haru is stuck grieving Luis, unable to move on as his ghost periodically visits her in a giant crow costume, ready to dance with her. It’s a heavy-handed metaphor that ultimately earns consistent laughs throughout, albeit the playfully absurd surrealism is sure to make some audiences in Middle America roll their eyes.

    Kikuchi shines in a painfully complex role of a woman trying to regain touch with her appetite for life, selling the character not only through her heartbreaking acting, but through her dance moves, which personify every emotion she faces with the utmost humanity.

    YOU also delivers a hilarious supporting performance as the wry divorcee who pushes her friend with the wisdom, “It’s OK to get messy. That’s life.”

    All big productions with stunning set pieces, none of the dance scenes feel too forced, representing Haru’s big emotions in certain situations — one grand number on a train uses practical effects to create a beautiful illusion. Granted, there is one Japanese re-creation of Dirty Dancing after several nods to the 1987 movie, which might come off cheesy, but seeing it through Haru’s eyes manages to recapture some of the tingly feelings from the Swayze-Grey classic.

    A tribute to his own ballroom-dancing mother, Wladyka paints a beautiful picture of life and love, grief and closure, using dance as a universal language to express all of the above, with help from a talented ensemble of Japanese and Latin actors.

    Producers are Kimberly Parker Zox, Mao Nagakura and Wladyka, with executive producers James Hausler, Kikuchi and Kenji Ito.

    Title: Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!
    Festival: Sundance (U.S. Dramatic Competition)
    Director: Josef Kubota Wladyka
    Screenwriters: Josef Kubota Wladyka and Nicholas Huynh
    Cast: Rinko Kikuchi, Alberto Guerra, Alejandro Edda, YOU, Yoh Yoshida, Damián Alcázar
    Sales agent: CAA
    Running time: 2 hr 2 min

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    Glenn Garner

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  • ‘The Lake’ Review: Climate Change Doc From Leonardo DiCaprio, Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi Raises Alarms About the Fate of the Great Salt Lake

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    After seeing Abby Ellis’ urgent Sundance documentary “The Lake,” on the imminent collapse of Utah’s Great Salt Lake due to water overconsumption and rising temperatures, strolling around Park City, Utah, feels inevitably upsetting.

    This January might be an anomaly, but the town’s warmer-than-usual temperatures, combined with grand vistas of mostly snowless hills (which would normally be under a thick white blanket during the Sundance Film Festival), look distressing upon in the context of the climate-change alarm bells Ellis rings throughout her environmental call to action about her home state. As if the drought weren’t concerning enough, our anxieties are compounded by legislators’ inability to address the threat the vanishing lake poses or to provide the immediate attention the issue demands.

    Thankfully, there are tireless scientists and some lawmakers fighting an uphill battle every day to save Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere. Ellis’ documentary profiles three of them, following their joint work in a vérité style. One is Bonnie Baxter, a biology scientist we meet as she remembers her childhood around the lake during a plane ride over it. It’s an eye-opening journey that puts the emergency of present-day low water levels on display. Then there is the Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian Steed, appointed to his newly created post by Governor Spencer Cox in 2023 as a political and scientific insider to oversee the efforts. And finally, there is Ben Abbott, a global ecologist whose science and everyday life make up the majority of “The Lake.”

    All three characters bring a different quality and temperament to the economically assembled film (co-edited by Ellis and Emelie Mahdavian of “Bitterbrush”), balancing one another’s dispositions. Baxter’s soft-spoken but unimpeachable authority finds its perfect match in Abbott’s outwardly passionate charisma. Meanwhile, Steed brings a savvy adaptability to the table, despite the fact that his role as a bridge between politics and science sometimes seems at odds with the results the three try to achieve in unison.

    One of the most noteworthy aspects of the trio is Abbott’s identity as a Mormon. As devoted to science and religion as he is to his loving family with young, adorable kids, Abbott doesn’t view prayer and scientific facts as mutually exclusive parts of his life, a quality that Ellis soundly portrays. Presenting Abbott as a man of both faith and science sets a refreshing tone, welcoming everyone into the climate change battle and scientific discourse. Elsewhere, Ellis’ care not to mention of divisive political parties achieves a similar inclusivity: The environment is and should be a bipartisan concern.

    Perhaps the grimmest fact “The Lake” spells out (and this is mentioned more than once) is the lack of any success stories from around the world for similarly scaled wetland disasters. In other words, scientists don’t have a case study to look up to or be inspired by in their quest to reverse the Great Salt Lake’s demise. And that slow death goes like this: With more of the water evaporating from the lake, more toxins that exist on the dry waterbeds get released into the air through worsening dust storms. Consequently, vast communities settled around the lake experience increased rates of cancer, reproductive health issues, respiratory problems and more. Even Baxter faces declining health during the making of the film, a devastating outcome for a selfless public interest fighter. Similarly, people who have lived around the lake for their entire lives now have to make an impossible decision: relocate for the future and health of their kids, or wait it out?

    Except, sticking around doesn’t seem like a feasible option when Abbott, Baxter and Steed present a report that predicts the total collapse of the Great Salt Lake in five years. It’s infuriating to see how, after Utah sees historic rainfalls in late 2025, their report is met with skepticism. Their analytical explanations that the rainfall is an anomaly and doesn’t eradicate the long-term problem mostly fall on deaf ears. Similarly, their budgetary asks for necessary structures (like dust monitors to keep the communities safe) are only afforded the bare minimum amount. Along the way, the practical trio try to go a different route, diverting everyone’s attention to the endangered species of the region, like Wilson’s phalarope whose survival depends on the Great Salt Lake’s permanence. But even that winnable leverage doesn’t get them far enough.

    Rest assured, there are some significant gains and victories in the end, like the money they eventually procure for sufficient dust monitors, along with sizable efforts to improve water flows and protect wetlands. Still, “The Lake” doesn’t end on an unrealistically uplifting note. (In fact, watching the lawmakers’ and federal government’s overarching apathy recalls Adam McKay’s cautionary political comedy “Don’t Look Up,” in which people refuse to acknowledge a comet that is about to destroy the planet.) “The Lake” instead leaves the aftertaste of a truthful note of caution, reminding audiences that when it comes to environmental battles, winning slowly is the same as losing. Science, in this case, requires us to sprint first and do the marathon later, not the other way around. On these grounds alone, “The Lake” is so much more than a regionally isolated issue documentary. Its lessons should apply to every single environmental fight around the world.

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    Tomilaffly

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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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  • The Sundance Film Festival prepares to bid farewell to Park City, and Robert Redford

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    The Sundance Film Festival may be a little bittersweet this year. It will be familiar in some ways as it kicks off on Thursday in Park City, Utah. There will be stars, from Natalie Portman to Charli XCX, and breakout discoveries, tearjerkers, comedies, thrillers, oddities that defy categorization and maybe even a few future Oscar nominees. The pop ups and sponsors will be out in full force on Main Street. The lines to get into the 90 movies premiering across 10 days will be long and the volunteers will be endlessly helpful and cheery in subfreezing temperatures.

    But the country’s premier showcase for independent film is also in a time of profound transition after decades of relative stability. The festival is bidding farewell to its longtime home and forging forward without its founder, Robert Redford, who died in September. Next year, it must find its footing in another mountain town, Boulder, Colorado.

    It’s no surprise that legacy will be a through-line at this year’s final edition in Park City. There will be screenings of restored Sundance gems like “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Mysterious Skin,” “House Party” and “Humpday” as well as Redford’s first truly independent film, the 1969 sports drama “Downhill Racer.” Many will also pay tribute to Redford at the institute’s fundraising event, where honorees include Chloé Zhao, Ed Harris and Nia DaCosta.

    “Sundance has always been about showcasing and fostering independent movies in America. Without that, so many filmmakers wouldn’t have had the careers they have,” said “Mysterious Skin” filmmaker Gregg Araki. He first attended the festival in 1992 and has been back many times, including at the labs where Zhao was one of his students.

    Quite a few festival veterans are planning to make the trip, including “Navalny” filmmaker Daniel Roher. His first Sundance in 2022 might have been a bit unconventional (made fully remote at the last minute due to the pandemic) but ended on a high note with an Oscar. This year he’s back with two films, his narrative debut “Tuner,” and the world premiere of “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,” which he co-directed with Charlie Tyrell.

    “We’re going through a weird moment in the world … There’s something that strikes me about an institution that has been evergreen, that seems so entrenched going through its own transition and rebirth,” Roher told The Associated Press. “I’m choosing to frame this year as a celebration of Sundance and the institute and a future that will ensure the festival goes on forever and ever and ever and stays the vital conduit for so many filmmakers that it has been.”

    Over the past four decades, countless careers have been shaped and boosted by the festival and the Institute. Three of this year’s presumed Oscar nominees — Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Coogler and Zhao — are among those the Institute supported early in their careers.

    Jay Duplass, who first came to Sundance in 2003 with his brother, Mark, with what he calls a “$3 film” said it was the place where his career was made.

    “I’d probably be a psychologist right now if it wasn’t for Sundance,” Duplass said.

    While he’s been to “probably 15 Sundances” since, it hasn’t lost its luster. In fact, when a programmer called him to tell him that his new film “See You When I See You” was selected, he cried. The film is based on a memoir in which a young comedy writer (Cooper Raiff) attempts to process the death of his sister (Kaitlyn Dever). It’s one of many films that finds humor amid grim subjects.

    As always, the lineup is full of starry films as well, including Cathy Yan’s art world satire, “The Gallerist,” starring Portman, Jenna Ortega, Sterling K. Brown, Zach Galifianakis and Da’Vine Joy Randolph. The romantic drama “Carousel,” from Rachel Lambert, features Chris Pine and Jenny Slate as high school exes who rekindle their romance later in life. Araki is also bringing a new film, “I Want Your Sex,” in which Olivia Wilde plays a provocative artist (Araki described as a cross between Madonna and Robert Mapplethorpe) who takes on Cooper Hoffman as her younger muse.

    “It’s kind of a sex-positive love letter to Gen Z,” Araki said. “It’s a comedy. It has elements of mystery, thriller, murder — a little bit of ‘Sunset Boulevard’ … it’s fun, it’s colorful, it’s sexy. It’s a ride.”

    Wilde also steps behind the camera for “The Invite,” in which she stars alongside Seth Rogen as a couple whose marriage disintegrates over the course of an evening. Olivia Colman is a fisherwoman looking to make the perfect husband in “Wicker,” co-starring Alexander Skarsgård. Zoey Deutch plays a Midwestern bride-to-be seeking out her celebrity “free pass” (Jon Hamm) in the screwball comedy “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass.” And Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe lead the Depression-era crime drama “The Weight.”

    Pop star and noted cinephile Charli XCX will also be out and about, starring in the self-referential mockumentary “The Moment,” and appearing in “The Gallerist” and “I Want Your Sex” as well.

    The 2026 festival features a robust lineup of documentaries too, which have a good track record of snagging eventual Oscar nominations and wins. There are a handful of films about famous faces, including basketball star Brittney Griner, Courtney Love, Salman Rushdie, Billie Jean King, Nelson Mandela and comedian Maria Bamford.

    Others delve into newsy subjects past and present, like “When A Witness Recants,” in which author Ta-Nehisi Coates revisits the case of the 1983 murder of a boy in his Baltimore middle school and learns the truth. “American Doctor” follows three professionals trying to help in Gaza. “Who Killed Alex Odeh” examines the 1985 assassination of a Palestinian American activist in Southern California. “Everybody To Kenmure Street” is about civil resistance to deportations in Glasgow in 2021. And “Silenced” tracks international human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson in her fight against the weaponization of defamation laws against victims of gender violence.

    And some don’t fit into any easy category, like “The History of Concrete” in which filmmaker John Wilson takes what he learned at a “how to sell a Hallmark movie” seminar and tries to apply it to a documentary on concrete.

    There might be a bit of wistfulness in the air too, as everyone takes stock of the last Sundance in Park City and tries to imagine what Boulder might hold.

    “It feels very special to be part of the last one in Park City,” Duplass said. “It’s just a super special place where, you know there are going to be movies there with giant stars and there’s also going to be some kids there who made movies for a few thousand dollars. And they’re all going to mix.”

    Araki, like Redford, knew long ago that the festival had outgrown Park City. It will be strange to no longer have its iconic locations like Egyptian Theatre and Eccles and The Ray anymore, but it’s also just a place.

    “The legacy and the tradition of Sundance will continue no matter where it is,” Araki said.

    ___

    For more coverage of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/sundance-film-festival

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