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Tag: Sundance Film Festival

  • One Lesson in Leadership from Robert Redford

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    As an Academy Award winning director, actor, producer, and the founder of Sundance Film Festival, the late Robert Redford, 89, was undoubtedly an impressive individual. But what made him a great leader was his “generosity to incubating new talent,” according to Michelle Satter, the founding senior director of Artist Programs at the Sundance Institute, who worked with Redford for 44 years.

    Satter penned a homage to Redford’s leadership style in TIME Magazine, where she noted that despite his many talents, Redford was very “humble” and a “good listener.” At the beginning of their professional relationship, Satter admitted she struggled with being in the presence of someone so accomplished.

    “It felt like the most important person in the world was sitting next to me,” Satter wrote. “I would often wonder to myself, how could I just be me, authentically, around someone of that stature? But Bob was uniquely humble. I quickly discovered that he only wanted us to be ourselves, and be completely present.”

    Evidently, Redford was aware of how nervous he made aspiring filmmakers, and other types of professionals trying to break into Hollywood. So how did he make these folks feel comfortable? He listened, Satter said. Perhaps business leaders can take a page out of Redford’s playbook to build the next generation of talent.

    “Watching him as a creative advisor guiding the emerging filmmakers was truly mesmerizing,” she said. “With an awareness of his own presence, he would intentionally start by listening and inspiring filmmakers to find their voice, their stories, and the confidence and skills they needed as directors and writers.”

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    Kayla Webster

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  • Sundance Film Festival reveals details about Robert Redford tributes and legacy screenings

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    Robert Redford’s legacy and mission was always going to be a key component of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, which will be the last of its kind in Park City, Utah. But in the wake of his death in Septemberat age 89, those ideas took on a new significance.

    This January, the institute that Redford founded over 40 years ago, plans to honor his career and impact with and a screening of his first truly independent film, the 1969 sports drama “Downhill Racer,” and a series of legacy screenings of restored Sundance gems from “Little Miss Sunshine” to “House Party,” festival organizers said Tuesday.

    “As we were thinking about how best to honor Mr. Redford’s legacy, it’s not only carrying forward this notion of ‘everyone has a story’ but it’s also getting together in a movie theater and watching a film that really embodies that independent spirit,” festival director Eugene Hernandez told The Associated Press. “We’ve had some incredible artists reach out to us, even in the past few weeks since Mr. Redford’s passing, who just want to be part of this year’s festival.”

    Archival screenings will include “Saw,” “Mysterious Skin,” “House Party,” and “Humpday” as well as the 35th anniversary of Barbara Kopple’s documentary “American Dream,” and 20th anniversaries of “Half Nelson” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” with some of the filmmakers expected to attend as well.

    “Over the almost 30 years of Sundance Institute’s collaboration with our partner, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, we’ve not only worked to ensure that the Festival’s legacy endures through film preservation, but we’ve seen that output feed an astonishing resurgence of repertory cinema programming across the country,” said festival programmer John Nein. “The films we’ve preserved and the newly restored films screening at this year’s festival, including some big anniversaries, are an important way to keep the independent stories from years past alive in our culture today.”

    Tickets for the 2026 festival, which runs from Jan. 22 through Feb. 1, go on sale Wednesday at noon Eastern, with online and in person options. Some planning is also already underway for the festival’s new home in Boulder, Colorado, in 2027, but programmers are heads down figuring out the slate of world premieres for January. Those will be revealed in December.

    “There’s a lot more to come and a lot more to announce,” Hernandez said. “This is just laying a foundation.”

    Redford’s death has added a poignancy to everything.

    “Seeing and hearing the remembrances took me back to why I felt compelled to go to the festival in the first place,” Hernandez said. “It’s been very grounding and clarifying and for us as a team it’s been very emotional and moving. But it’s also been an opportunity to remind ourselves what Mr. Redford has given to us, to our lives, to our industry, to Utah.”

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  • One of the Best Films of the Year Is Just Two People Talking

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    Photo: Sundance Institute

    This review was originally published on February 3, 2025 out of the Sundance Film Festival. We are recirculating it now timed to the New York Film Festival.

    Can a doodle also be a masterpiece? Maybe it’s not fair to call Peter Hujar’s Day a doodle, though Ira Sachs’s film, clocking in at 76 minutes, wears its modesty on its sleeve. Consisting of a conversation between two people in a West Village apartment, filmed austerely but evocatively, the picture revels in its spareness, its warm simplicity. It starts off as an elevation of the quotidian but transforms into something sadder and more reflective.

    The film is a re-creation of an interview that happened on December 19, 1974, between the renowned photographer Hujar (Ben Whishaw) and his friend, the journalist Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), who intended their conversation to be part of a book about how different people spent their day. Having taken notes on what he did the day before, Hujar is precise in his accounting, but his fixation on seemingly meaningless details betrays his photographer’s eye. Much of what he talks about is a shoot he was assigned to do with the poet Allen Ginsberg. But other names float through over the course of the conversation — Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, Glenn O’Brien — in that rather New York way, where a conversation between two people usually becomes a conversation about a dozen other people.

    It’s not hard to get lost amid all these names and half-anecdotes, but I think that’s also part of the point. Sachs is clearly animated by a love for this long-lost downtown scene, and he conveys it as much through his images and his cutting as he does through the dialogue (which is taken directly from Rosenkrantz’s transcript). As the two talk, they move around different parts of the apartment. They make coffee, they drink tea and eat cookies. They stand outside. They lounge in bed. The light changes. Their outfits change. A shaft of sunlight might hit Hujar in an odd way, the warm glow of a sunset might reflect off a surface. Distant sounds from the street drift in. They touch each other’s legs and heads and feet, glancingly and sensuously, though not sexually. Such sense memories aren’t there to precisely chart Peter Hujar’s path through Linda Rosenkrantz’s apartment. Rather, they evoke sense memories in all of us — we all understand light, and warmth, and the feeling of another person’s touch. It’s through such subtle cues that this tender, lovely film starts to feel like something we might have all experienced once.

    Whishaw obviously has to do most of the heavy lifting, dialogue-wise, but Hall is his equal in the way she uses her silences. Her adoration of Hujar comes through, as well as her ease around him. Whishaw gives Hujar’s words a matter-of-fact quality, but there’s a slight hint of melancholy to him, too. He’s filled with anxieties about his art and his work. (The Ginsberg shoot, he says, is his first job for the New York Times.) Hell, he’s filled with anxieties about going four blocks down to another part of the Village. But Whishaw, whose voice is one of modern cinema’s great wonders (there’s a reason why he makes such a good Paddington), conveys the nervousness and the hope and the boredom and the sadness all at once.

    Rosenkrantz’s intended book never materialized, but she did publish the Hujar interview as its own volume years later, in 2022, by which point AIDS had long claimed the photographer. So loss is, in a way, built into the very concept of the film. The intimacy draws us in, as if we might know these people. At the same time, we also understand that we’ll never know these people. The maze of names and facts in Hujar’s account, the familiarity he and Rosenkrantz have with each other, the way the setting light captures the ephemerality of this moment, it all feels like something that’s already vanished. We’re watching a mundane spectacle of a mundane spectacle — a man in a room relating the mostly forgettable events of the previous day — but somehow, we’re also witnessing the arc of time within this quiet hour. So, no, the film is maybe not a doodle. There’s too much craft, too much care here for that. But it is a masterpiece.


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    Bilge Ebiri

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  • Robert Redford’s Real Hollywood Legacy Is in Utah

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    At the Sundance Institute’s filmmakers labs, Roger Ross Williams, the Oscar-winning documentarian, happened to be paired with Sundance Institute founder Robert Redford as a mentor.

    Williams was prepping for his narrative feature debut, Cassandro. He tells The Hollywood Reporter, “I told Bob about my fears. I said, ‘I’m a documentarian, and I’m really nervous about making this transition and working with actors.’ He said, ‘Lean into your documentary experience. You’re way ahead of the game. You actually know how to tap into people and get them to open up.’”

    Williams revealed to Redford that the scene that worried him the most was the film’s sex scene. “We were sitting at the table in the lunch room at the Sundance Resort, and he storyboarded the sex scene for me. He drew out the sex scene for me on the back of script pages,” remembers Williams, who has since had the pages framed and hung in his office. 

    Adds Williams, “When he was at the lab, he wasn’t this big Hollywood superstar. He was someone who really valued giving back to filmmakers like me. The celebrity melted away.”  

    Redford died Tuesday at his Utah home at the age of 89. He is remembered for onscreen roles that spanned drama, comedy, romance, western and action, from Barefoot in the Park and All the President’s Men to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and directing turns like the Oscar-winning Ordinary People. But in the indie filmmaking community, he will likely be best remembered not for his work onscreen but instead at the base of a ski mountain.

    From the filmmakers’ labs to its marquee Sundance Film Festival, the Redford-founded Sundance Institute has helped launch hundreds of careers, including Steven Soderbergh, Ryan Coogler, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Paul Thomas Anderson, Chloé Zhao and Quentin Tarantino.

    Tom Bernard, the co-founder of Sony Pictures Classics, had been attending the Salt Lake-based US Film Festival, then the country’s preeminent indie fest, when he was connected to Redford, who wanted to figure out a way to support independent film in his home state of Utah. 

    Says Bernard, “It was a moment in time where there were a lot of people who wanted to make independent films. They had ideas, they had some financing, but they didn’t have the skills that you would learn in a union to be a cinematographer or a director. Bob wanted to put together a lab for the summer where he would invite all his friends from Hollywood to come with a selection of independent filmmakers.” 

    The Sundance Institute was founded and produced the first filmmaker lab in 1981. Filmmakers like Sydney Pollack, who worked with Redford on Out of Africa and Jeremiah Johnson, and Midnight Cowboy writer Waldo Salt traveled to Redford’s Sundance Mountain Resort to help mentor young filmmakers with independent features they were developing. (The actor purchased the land in 1969, saving it from developers looking to build condominiums in the Provo Canyon.) 

    According to famed critic Roger Ebert, in his report from that first 1981 gathering, the larger entertainment industry was wary of Redford’s ambitions at the time, with the thinking being the Sundance Institute was an attempt, as the critic wrote, to establish “his own mini-studio here on the mountain he is developing.” Redford countered that he did not have plans to produce the films developed at his filmmaker labs, telling Ebert, “They say I’m starting my own studio; I’m challenging the studios. Actually, I have no idea what this will turn out to be.”

    Over the years, the labs expanded to include directing, screenwriting and producing programs, among others, under the guidance of Michelle Satter. But Redford was a constant presence. 

    Says Bernard, “You go out to the lab and he’s playing catch with somebody because he’s practicing for The Natural and then he would go check in with people about their films. It was a part of his life.” 

    And, of course, there is the film festival. 

    The Sundance Institute took over the US Film Festival, which had moved from Salt Lake to Park City, in 1985. (The name wasn’t officially changed to the Sundance Film Festival until 1991.)

    As he told it, Redford, one of Hollywood’s brightest stars and best-known leading men, was imploring people to go into a 300-seat movie theater. “It was like a guy standing outside a speakeasy or something,” Redford said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2009 of handing out tickets in the early 1980s to Sundance Film Festival screenings at Park City’s The Egyptian theater. “People would say, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, there’s a thing we are doing.’” 

    That “thing” would become the nation’s top independent film festival, running for over four decades.

    “It was about five years before I even knew we would succeed and stay alive,” Redford said in the 2009 interview, adding that a turning point for Sundance in the eyes of Hollywood was when a Columbia executive bought the Dennis Quaid drama The Big Easy out of the 1986 fest. But it was Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape that really put the festival on the map as a place for young filmmakers to debut cutting-edge work.

    Wes Anderson screened his short film, Bottle Rocket, in 1993, while in 1998 Darren Aronofsky made his feature debut with Pi and Coogler screened his debut, Fruitvale Station, in 2013.

     “I was there in ’91 with my first film that anyone would care to watch, Slacker,” Richard Linklater tells THR. “Slacker played in the competition, which is remarkable. It was such a weird film. It didn’t win any awards or anything, but it did help the film. It was just a good profile.” The director says that Sundance bridged the gap for filmmakers who weren’t first-timers but studios weren’t yet ready to take a chance on. He says, “I was always happy to show at Sundance. I was not a Sundance one-and-done-er by any means. I was very happy to always go back there.”

    Linklater went back to the festival a couple of years later in 1995 with Before Sunrise. Says Linklater, “I was talking to Ethan Hawke today. We were just sharing Redford stories and saying he was so sweet. He got up and introduced [Before Sunrise], and I got eternal points with my parents and family. When they go to a screening and Robert Redford gets up there and introduces you and sings your praises, I was set for life with the family.”

    For filmmakers, Sundance, whether screening a film in competition or attending the Institute’s labs, has long been a place of happy accidents, chance encounters and big breaks.

    Barry Levinson headed to Utah after his feature film debut. “I had done Diner, which had already played in its national release. I was invited up to Sundance as a young writer-director for that weekend,” he tells THR. “When I had to head to the airport, I ran into Redford. He said hello and I said I was going to the airport. He said, ‘So am I. You need a ride?’ I got into his car, and it was quite the journey, in terms of him as a race car driver.” 

    Levinson continues, “We talked on the plane, and he said, ‘If you ever have an idea, give me a holler, and let’s talk.’” Levinson’s second feature film was The Natural.

    The Sundance Film Festival’s storied run in Park City will come to an end after this year’s festival, the last in Utah before the fest heads to its new home of Boulder, Colorado, in 2027. Of the long-term future of the festival, Redford said in 2009, “My feeling is when the day comes when we’re no longer providing the mission we started with — not creating something for new audiences, creating new opportunities for new artists to have a place to come and develop — then we shouldn’t be here, and we won’t.” 

    As one of those filmmakers boosted by Redford’s Sundance, Linklater assesses, “I just can’t think of another person who had the impact on the filmmaking world — and I’m not hyperbolizing — in the way Redford did.” 

    Julian Sancton and Ryan Gajewski contributed to this report. 

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    Mia Galuppo

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  • Robert Redford | 60 Minutes Archive

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    In an excerpt from a 60 Minutes interview in 2001, actor and Sundance founder Robert Redford discussed his career and his love for America. Redford died today at age 89.

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  • Robert Redford Remembered: How Hollywood’s Golden Boy Used His Star Power to Boost Indies and Launch the Sundance Film Festival 

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    Today, the film industry lost not only one of its brightest stars, but also one of its biggest champions: Robert Redford, who was instrumental to two revolutions that transformed Hollywood.

    An iconic face in such films as “All the President’s Men” and “The Natural,” Redford was a key figure of the New Hollywood — the late-’60s creative upheaval that brought fresh life to the film industry, at a time when television was siphoning audiences away and the studios were flailing to identify what the younger generation wanted. The answer: They wanted relevant stories and leading men like Redford, who could take the mantle from earlier matinee idols, and do so with a certain knowing twinkle in his eye that showed he was in on the joke.

    Released in 1969, the free-spirited and forward-thinking Western “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” may have made Redford a star, but the Sundance Film Festival made him a saint, launching a near-total overhaul of the film business around writer-directors. Because success came early to “the kid” — a strawberry blond California-born sun god who battled the stereotype that he was just another pretty face — he took the opportunity to reinvent himself several times over the course of his career.

    Redford was born in Santa Monica, Calif., but resented the urbanization and pollution that transformed his hometown, connecting instead with Utah’s unspoiled forests, building a cabin there as early as 1961. In the years that followed, Redford wore three hats: actor, the man who calls action (i.e. director of films such as “Ordinary People” and “Quiz Show”) and activist. On the latter front, Redford was known for his liberal causes, including his decades-long advocacy for all things environmental, though it’s the creation of the Sundance Film Festival in the mid-’80s — rebranding the Utah-based US Film Festival — that had the greatest impact on what movies are today.

    All my life, critics have praised the golden era of ’70s cinema, of which Redford was a fixture, playing a wide range of iconic roles, from the rugged wilderness man in “Jeremiah Johnson” to the Jazz Age millionaire of “The Great Gatsby.” Two short months after the Watergate break-in, he appeared in 1972’s political satire “The Candidate,” and four years later, he embodied dogged Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men,” the definitive account of the moment America lost faith in its leaders.

    Those movies are stone-cold classics, to be sure, and yet I believe the 1990s were every bit as important a decade, as a direct result of the independent film movement Redford was so committed to supporting. At a moment when Hollywood was again struggling, making star-driven tentpoles and sequels for corporations, audiences were craving originality. Sundance provided exactly that, along with a platform for the little guy: unknown filmmakers and actors, telling personal stories on limited budgets.

    Sundance was more than just a festival; it was also an institute, founded in 1981 (20 years after Redford built his first cabin in Utah), committed to developing the next generation of storytellers by partnering them with more established mentors through its various labs. If it weren’t for Sundance — which attracted agents and execs looking for some ski time in its early years, but later became a veritable marketplace for independent movies in search of distribution — would the world have discovered such voices as Steven Soderbergh (“Sex, Lies and Videotape”), Quentin Tarantino (“Reservoir Dogs”), Wes Anderson (“Bottle Rocket”), Ryan Coogler (“Fruitvale Station”) and Rian Johnson (“Brick”)?

    Redford worked tirelessly behind the scenes, but it helped enormously to have a star of his stature to serve as the face of such an event, lending showbiz cred to a festival that filled what started as a niche but became an entire sector of the industry: Sundance served as a place for discovery, focusing on fresh talents of diverse backgrounds. If people whom the studios might never have cast or otherwise entrusted to make a film could somehow do so on their own, Sundance became the ideal place for them to be recognized.

    In recent years, though he had effectively retired from acting, Redford continued to appear in the occasional movie, including those by Sundance veterans such as J.C. Chandor (the one-man-show that is “All Is Lost”) and David Lowery (whose “The Old Man & the Gun” feels like a throwback to early Redford roles).

    Redford’s acting career began a decade before “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” with roles on Broadway. One of his first big films, opposite Jane Fonda in “Barefoot in the Park,” was the direct result of playing the same part on stage, though he never looked back once Hollywood called.

    “Butch Cassidy” opened the same year as Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” and was its opposite in nearly every way. Both films climax with a violent standoff, though “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” eschews the over-the-top carnage, ending on a freeze frame, rather than a bloodbath. (That also makes it a lighter alternative to “Bonnie and Clyde,” the Warren Beatty movie that kicked off the New Hollywood two years earlier.)

    That playful tone proved an even better fit for “The Sting” (1973), which reunited Redford with director George Roy Hill and co-star Paul Newman. Redford is never more charming than he is in that multi-Oscar winner, though I’d argue that Sydney Pollack understood the actor’s potential better than any other director. The pair made seven movies together.

    In “The Way We Were,” Pollack tapped Redford’s romantic potential (opposite Barbra Steisand), and in “Three Days of the Condor,” he emphasized the actor’s intelligence in the ’70s most entertaining (and sexiest) conspiracy thriller. Their two-decade collaboration built to “Out of Africa,” a sweeping, nearly last-of-its-kind Hollywood love story that robbed “The Color Purple” of Best Picture, but served as a fitting summit to Redford’s acting career, following on the heels of his beloved turn as all-American slugger Roy Hobbs in “The Natural.”

    It was right around that time, in 1985, that he poured himself into Sundance. Today, when practically every city has at least one film festival, it may be hard to imagine how idealistic and risky Sundance was at its inception.

    By this time in his career, Redford had already made the leap from actor to director with “Ordinary People,” a devastating family drama featuring hall-of-fame performances from its cast (Redford did not act in his debut, but won an Oscar for direction). If that project was the culmination of what he’d learned from the great directors he’d worked with, Sundance was an effort to open the field to others, to eliminate the barriers of entry and encourage stories that weren’t being told (as well as environmental-themed movies close to Redford’s heart, such as “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The Cove”).

    Over the years, aspiring filmmakers maxed out their credit cards to make calling-card projects, hoping to win the proverbial lottery: first being selected to play Sundance, and once there, hopefully sparking a bidding war for rights to their movie. More dreams were shattered than were ever made along the way.

    Still, there’s no denying that Sundance served as both incubator and launchpad for some of cinema’s most important artists — many of whom were tapped to make studio tentpoles on the strength of their vision (half the Marvel movies were made by Sundance vets), which just goes to show how influential it was. Over the years, Redford has made a point of appearing on opening day of the festival, but never wanted to be the focus of attention there. Sundance was his way of giving back, of paying it forward — or, to put it in eco-conscious terms — of recycling the good fortune he’d enjoyed into opportunities for others. That, as much as his unforgettable film roles, will be legacy.

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    Peter Debruge

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  • Can the Sundance Film Festival Survive Leaving Park City?

    Can the Sundance Film Festival Survive Leaving Park City?

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    In a highly unusual competition that’s been taking place over the last year, all pegged to the future location of the Sundance Film Festival (“Hey, cities of America! Want to host a world-class independent film festival? Enter our sweepstakes now!”), the most unusual moment had to be the unveiling, this week, of the three finalists that are vying to be the new seat of Sundance. They are: Boulder, Cincinnati, and Salt Lake City/Park City. That last option was a real eyebrow-raiser, since it’s where the Sundance Film Festival takes place right now. You were led to wonder: Has this entire contest been a giant subterfuge, a way for Sundance to simply secure a new deal, or maybe a better deal, with its original home base?

    Actually, it’s not that simple. If Salt Lake City/Park City does turn out to be the winner (the announcement is scheduled to be made in February 2025, shortly after the upcoming edition of Sundance), notice the order in which those two cities are listed. Park City has hosted the Sundance Film Festival since 1981 (back when it was called the U.S. Film Festival), with a sprinkling of screenings and events taking place in Salt Lake City. I’ve been going to Sundance since 1995, and I have never once been to a screening in Salt Lake City. But in the new arrangement, if the dual Utah locales were to win out, Sundance would mostly transplant itself to Salt Lake; Park City would become a minor satellite. This would mark a profound change, logistically and spiritually.

    You would still be surrounded by those crisp beautiful wintry mountains. But Park City first became the home of Sundance after Robert Redford moved to the area, founded the Sundance Institute, and branded the pristine rugged countryside surrounding Park City with his environmentally conscious presence. Ever since, it’s been impossible to separate the Park City-ness of Sundance from the Reford-ness of Sundance. And I’m not just talking about the golden glow of Redford’s celebrity. I’m talking about what he stands for as an artist and why he cultivated Sundance in the first place: the belief that there should be a vital place for films made outside the Hollywood system (something that he began to take steps toward doing in the late ’60s). Park City is a former prospector town whose mystique fused, through Sundance, with Redford’s electric-horseman movie-star glamour. And the festival made the town a lot of money, so all was good.

    But money is now the reason that Sundance is looking to move. The Sundance Film Festival is still profitable for Park City, but in the age of upscale winter vacations for the one percent, the ski season has turned out to be an even more gilded prospect. Simply put, the town can make more money from skiing than it can from a film festival. So it’s a lot less welcoming, in that roll-out-the-white-snow-carpet way, to all things Sundance.

    But if Sundance were to move to Salt Lake City, the Venn diagram of overlap between what the festival represents and what Salt Lake City represents would be very small indeed. The festival is arty and progressive and cosmopolitan; Salt Lake City is the austere Western seat of Mormonism. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but how do those two things go together? They don’t. I can imagine a Sundance Film Festival hosted by Salt Lake City feeling like an arid and oxymoronic affair. Though it would be just a 45-minute ride from Park City, the prevailing attitude might be: If Sundance was going to leave its beloved home for all those years to come here, then why didn’t it just go to someplace like Boulder or Cincinnati?

    Boulder strikes me as the most Park City-like of the three options. So maybe Sundance, starting in 2027 (which is when the move is scheduled to kick in), would do well to pull up stakes and move to a beautiful former prospecting town in the middle of Colorado. Why not?

    But here’s where we come to the real problem. For the thousands of actors and filmmakers and executives and journalists and publicists who travel there each January, Park City has been a crucial element of Sundance’s identity. The place contains a lot of memories — at this point, you might describe it as a silver-and-turquoise Wild West institutional Sundance brain trust. Park City roots the Sundance brand. If you tear Sundance away from it, the festival’s identity is going to be something very different, and maybe something much less.

    One reason for that is that Sundance is already a film festival in the middle of a slow-motion identity crisis. In the 1980s, which was the low-budget earnest wheat-farm era of independent filmmaking, the U.S.-turned-Sundance Film Festival was still on the margins of the culture. But with the extraordinary rise of independent film, it became the seat of a cultural revolution. Starting in the ’90s, this is where you would find so many of the new artists, the new storytellers who would be heading to Hollywood or remaining independent (or both). It was a key place to connect with the future, and the game-changing present, of American cinema.

    Maybe it still is. But the sweet spot of Sundance is that it showcased movies that were works of art and that could find a place in the greater marketplace. That double reality, in the age of streaming and popcorn dominance, is harder and harder to come by. The films that emerge from Sundance have a lower profile than they used to. It’s not anyone’s fault; it’s just the way the structure of the movie business and audience taste is evolving. Sundance, you could argue (as I did last year when I asked: Have Sundance movies lost their danger?), is in danger of slipping, slowly but surely, into a boutique diminishment of relevance. So if it were to lose the mythic identity of its location now, I could see a bunch of people showing up in Boulder, or Cincinnati, or wherever and asking: Where are we? What has this festival become? Sundance would have a new location, but would that location be the new home for American independent film or just the place where it got sent?

    Let’s be clear where I’m coming from. I revere the Sundance Film Festival. I’m friendly with some of the people who run it (like Eugene Hernandez, the festival’s exemplary director), and I fully understand how much the festival’s decision to uproot itself — and to do it through this city-as-reality-show-contestant faceoff — is rooted in the dicey economics of 2024. Yet just as the financials make sense on paper, and there’s probably a ton of research backing up the wisdom of Sundance’s decision to move, I’m haunted by the financially driven, research-backed worst corporate marketing decision of the last half century: the introduction, in 1985, of the New Coke. The Coca-Cola company took the perfect product and decided to make it…less perfect. It was a disaster. The lesson was that some brands are so powerful that you mess with them at your peril.

    Almost every legendary film festival — Cannes, Venice, Telluride, Toronto — is named for the location where it takes place. Sundance isn’t called the Park City Film Festival, but it might as well be. That’s how wedded to the place it has always been. I wish Sundance the best, even if it winds up in Cincinnati, but I pray that they don’t take what began as the reel thing and drain it, through geography, into a ghostly imitation.

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    Owen Gleiberman

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  • June Squibb’s Action-Comedy ‘Thelma’ Sells to Magnolia After Sundance Premiere

    June Squibb’s Action-Comedy ‘Thelma’ Sells to Magnolia After Sundance Premiere

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    “Thelma,” an adventure-comedy starring June Squibb, has sold to Magnolia Pictures out of Sundance.

    Directed by Josh Margolin, the film follows a grandmother who embarks on a quest to recoup her money after she loses $10,000 in a phone scam. “Thelma,” which cheekily riffs on “Mission: Impossible,” also stars “White Lotus” breakout Fred Hechinger, the late Richard Roundtree (in his final screen performace), Parker Posey, Clark Gregg and Malcolm McDowell. The film is loosely based on an event that happened to Margolin’s own grandma, the 103-year-old Thelma Post.

    “Tom Cruise jumping out of a plane is as dangerous as my grandma getting onto a bed,” Margolin told Variety ahead of the film’s Sundance premiere. “I wanted to treat Thelma’s mission with the sincerity and stakes that you would Ethan Hunt globe-trotting to track down the bad guy.”

    “Thelma” marks the first leading film role of Squibb’s career. The 94-year-old Oscar-nominated actor insisted on doing her own stunts for the film, which included a vehicular showdown in the hallway of a retirement home with Roundtree, which culminates with an electric scooter crash.

    “They weren’t expecting me to do the scooter work,” Squibb told Variety. “They were so worried about me, they thought I was going to kill myself. They said, ‘Just tap his scooter,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, hell,’ and I just cowed into him.”

    In his review, Variety chief film critic Peter Debruge described the film as a “warm hug, one that anybody with an elderly relative can appreciate on some level.”

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    Ethan Shanfeld

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  • ‘Porcelain War’ Review: Intimate Reflection on Making Art in Wartime Ukraine Is Beautiful but Frustrating

    ‘Porcelain War’ Review: Intimate Reflection on Making Art in Wartime Ukraine Is Beautiful but Frustrating

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    Watching Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s visually confident, intellectually insecure documentary Porcelain War is like listening to a recitation from a brilliant poet while somebody sitting next to you is whispering what the poems are actually about. And the person sitting next to you explaining what the poet is trying to say is… twist… also the poet!

    There’s a great deal of beauty in Porcelain War and there’s a potent artistry behind it, but I’ve never watched a documentary with so many running visual metaphors and so little faith that the audience will be able to grasp them. It’s a bit stunning and a bit insulting all at once. That it often tends more toward the former explains its top award in the U.S. Documentary Competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

    Porcelain War

    The Bottom Line

    Visually confident but intellectually insecure.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Documentary Competition)
    Directors: Brendan Bellomo, Slava Leontyev

    1 hour 28 minutes

    The documentary is the story of Slava (the co-director) and Anya, partners in life and in art. He makes porcelain objects — snails, reptiles, owls — and she covers their white surfaces with intricate and whimsical paintings. They live in Crimea, surrounded by artists and friends, but when the Russians attack, rather than fleeing their homeland, they go from the country into Kharkiv, a city just 25 miles from the Russian border.

    In Kharkiv, Anya and Slava continue to make their art, placing their porcelain figures amid the rubble, while Slava is simultaneously serving as a weapons instructor for a military squad of civilians now forced to take up arms against the invading Russians. The artist couple is also accompanied by their bouncy dog Frodo, a terrier of some sort, and A VERY GOOD DOG.

    The third (or fourth, if you count Frodo, which you truly must) member of their little society of artists in extremis is their longtime friend Andrey Stefanov, a painter who has turned his attentions to photography during the war, when he isn’t lost in thought about his wife and daughters, who fled to Lithuania.

    The responsibility of the artist to continue to produce art in the darkest moments and the capacity of art to add beauty and levity in that darkness are just a few of the undercurrents in Porcelain War.

    Art is, as the documentary makes clear and then repeats, in and of itself a rebellious act and an act of creation to ward off destruction. It’s hard to dispute this contention, and the directors and Stefanov, the documentary’s primary cinematographer, do a moving job of capturing the contrasts between the bucolic countryside and the rubble left in urban centers by Russian bombing.

    The documentary shifts back and forth, often in hard cuts, from activities like a mushroom-hunting trip in the forest (or just Frodo leaping through sun-drenched fields) to the harsher realities of war. Except that both are reality, as we can see when one of their porcelain owls is placed on a decimated city wall or when Frodo very nearly happens upon a mine on one of their walks.

    But can war — at least from a defensive posture when what you’re protecting is your generational homeland and all you hold dear — be an act of creation and art? This is the complicated thesis that Porcelain War dances around while never necessarily committing to it.

    The necessity of fighting back against the Russians is never in doubt for the furniture salesmen and dairy farmers Slava is training. And once rebellion is happening anyway, we see Anya painting one of their bomb-equipped drones.

    That drones have become a crucial piece of documentary vernacular in the past decade is made clear in several shots in which the filmmaking drone is filming the war-making drones in action. That one is making art and the other is contributing to carnage (however righteous) is a conversation Porcelain War instigates without directly addressing. Perhaps the filmmakers are hoping to avoid questions of whether or not they explicitly view this as Ukrainian propaganda or just as a story.

    And you know that if the filmmakers felt comfortable making the topic explicit, they would, because the documentary is so very explicit in spelling things out at so many points. Like if you, dear reader, hear porcelain described as “fragile, yet everlasting” in a documentary about Ukraine, I’m betting there’s a connection you would be able to make without Slava’s voiceover coming out and saying, “Ukraine is like porcelain, easy to break, but impossible to destroy.”

    Everything in Porcelain War is a metaphor, including little Frodo, of whom Slava says, “Everyone says that he is gentle, but courageous,” before Anya adds, “a small embodiment of the Ukrainian spirit.” Over and over again, the documentary does this, planting a seed that might be perceptive or poignant or just witty and then denying the viewer the chance to make a not-too-large leap.

    Comparably to another Sundance prize winner, Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s Daughters, Porcelain War suggests that having a co-director who is also a featured subject in your documentary may be good for intimacy, but isn’t always ideal for dramatic clarity. Expecting Slava Leontyev the Director to agree that probably 75 percent of Slava Leontyev the Subject’s voiceover — thoroughly poetic and thoroughly duplicative — could be cut is a big ask.

    It’s my sense that in the absence of that voiceover, none of the documentary’s themes would be lost or weakened. It would be so much easier to marvel at Stefanov’s photography, to have your heart break at the tragic juxtapositions made by the editors, to celebrate the animation that flows out of Anya’s tiny paintings, to wait breathlessly through a harrowing sequence shot on a military body-cam. Or just to get carried along by the score from Ukrainian quartet DakhaBrakha as Frodo frolics obliviously on the edge of war.

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    Daniel Fienberg

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  • ‘Reinas’ Review: An Understated Portrait of a Peruvian Family Navigating Political Turmoil

    ‘Reinas’ Review: An Understated Portrait of a Peruvian Family Navigating Political Turmoil

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    Klaudia Reynicke’s compact feature Reinas deals in intimate moments with an understated charm. 

    The film, which premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic competition at Sundance, takes place in Lima during a tumultuous summer in 1992 and chronicles an unsteady reunion between a father and his two daughters. It’s a quiet study of paternal redemption, much like In the Summers, another one of this year’s festival offerings. Here, as in Alessandra Lacorazza’s debut, the complexities of a seemingly simple relationship reveal themselves over the course of slow summer days. Reynicke (Love Me Tender, Il Nido) shapes a moving character study of a family trying to ground itself against the backdrop of a shaky political landscape.

    Reinas

    The Bottom Line

    A compact feature filled with moments of understated charm.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (World Cinema Dramatic Competition)
    Cast: Abril Gjurinovic, Luana Vega, Jimena Lindo, Gonzalo Molina, Susi Sánchez
    Director: Klaudia Reynicke
    Screenwriters: Klaudia Reynicke, Diego Vega

    1 hour 44 minutes

    An excerpted television news report from the ’90s functions as a prologue, detailing a country in crisis. Peru’s minister of the economy announces that in the next 24 hours, the price of milk will jump from 120,000 Peruvian intis to 330,000, and the cost of sugar, now 150,000 intis, will double. In the middle of this throttled economy, Carlos (Gonzalo Molina) drives his taxi around the city. 

    When we meet the puerile father of Lucia (Abril Gjurinovic) and Aurora (Luana Vega), he is in the middle of a conversation about his dormant acting career with a half-interested passenger. The patron with the waning curiosity asks Carlos if he works in television or film. Carlos says he is a theater actor and then proceeds to list a few film roles. That this story — along with many others — doesn’t track isn’t clear until later. Reinas is about how Carlos reunites with his daughters just as the siblings prepare to leave Lima with their mother, Elena (Jimena Lindo). But it’s also about the stories a father tells himself and his children to construct a different self-image. 

    The Carlos that Aurora and Lucia, two mild-mannered girls, know is unreliable. At the start of Reinas, Carlos arrives late to eldest Aurora’s 18th birthday party. He barges in with a mouth full of lies — excuses for his tardiness that land like apologies for his general absence. When asked by the youngest, Lucia, about his whereabouts, Carlos, without missing a beat, says he’s been in the jungle fighting crocodiles. The girls can only muster disbelieving looks. Later at the party, when Carlos regales attendees with a harrowing story of near death and a car bomb, the audience has been primed to react the same way. 

    As Carlos spends more time with his girls, the illusion of who he wants to be is replaced with the reality of who he is. Reynicke shapes a portrait of a man making an effort. Some of the strongest and most charming moments in Reinas take place around two beach trips Carlos informally organizes at the behest of Lucia and Aurora. In these moments, he assumes the caretaking role he once abandoned. The beach excursions are imbued with hope and possibility. They take on a dreamy quality with ethereal choral music playing over scenes of Carlos teaching Lucia how to ride a wave or bartering with roadside hawkers to get the girls lunch or new swimsuits. 

    As played by Molina, Carlos is a figure who bets on his casual charm to mask his noncommittal nature and penchant for dishonesty. But as the character renews his commitment to his daughters, we can see him trying to fight this reflex and act more authentically. Molina teases out this shift, which helps mask lingering questions about Carlos’ employment, his position on the Peruvian political spectrum and the history between him and Elena. 

    Outside of the bubble that Carlos and Elena have created for their daughters, Lima roils. The city no longer feels safe and Reynicke offers a visceral portrayal of the political reality through unfussy scenes of daily life — conversations about the strict curfews, which manufacture fear; the scarcity of basic goods; and the challenge Elena faces when exchanging intis for U.S. dollars are among a few examples. 

    Elena, played with understated force by Lindo, doesn’t want to raise her children in this environment. She invites Carlos back into their lives in part because she needs him to sign their daughters’ travel papers. As Carlos forges new bonds with Lucia and Aurora and subtly tries to sabotage the plan, we see Elena run around Lima preparing for their upcoming trip.

    In Reinas, Reynicke offers a quietly sad portrait of an unexpected effort to make a family feel whole. Realizing that he might never see his daughters again, a reinvigorated Carlos recommits to them with quality time and tokens of affection. Even the way he refers to them — his preferred term of endearment is “reinas” — changes, feeling more weighted and sincere.

    Reynicke also dedicates screen time to depicting Lucia and Aurora’s relationship. Lucia remains adamant about going wherever her mother goes, but Aurora has her own priorities in Lima. The scenes of the sisters negotiating their own impending departure are steeped in fine-tuned devastation. By the end of Reinas, we start to see that it’s not only Carlos who needs to believe in a different reality.

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    Lovia Gyarkye

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  • ‘In a Violent Nature’ Review: A Fresh Canadian Spin on Slasher Conventions

    ‘In a Violent Nature’ Review: A Fresh Canadian Spin on Slasher Conventions

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    Slasher movies often droop between grisly highlights due to the weak plotting and cardboard characters meant to lend structural integrity to their shock content. “In a Violent Mind” avoids those pitfalls by pretty much sidestepping entirely the standard niceties of narrative and psychological detail. There is explanatory backstory — however piecemeal and possibly-inaccurate — but otherwise writer-director Chris Nash’s first feature approaches the usual bloody business with a sort of minimalist purity, enabled by focusing almost wholly on the POV of one Unstoppable Killing Machine. 

    It’s a gambit that might easily turn monotonous. Yet this Canadian indie manages to keep us engaged, stirring queasy viewer dread if not much outright terror. Premiering in Sundance’s Midnight section, the Shudder Original is slated to begin streaming on that genre platform sometime this spring. 

    We seem to be back in “Blair Witch” territory at the beginning (and again during a panicked stretch at the end), as off-camera hikers poke around the ruins of a forest fire tower. One of them spies a necklace draped on a pipe, which he pockets before they leave. Our suspicion that removing this talisman might be a bad idea soon bears fruit, as immediately afterward the ground stirs, and a man’s figure covered with soil emerges from its grave. It lumbers to a decrepit house on the border of these parklands — in which the entity once lived, we glean — where a local poacher has the misfortune to be malingering. 

    This first kill is not graphic, but such restraint won’t last long. That evening, the ghoul is attracted to a campfire outside a cabin, introducing us to seven young adults staying there. One of them (Sam Roulston as Ehren) tells the local legend of the “White Pine Massacre,” which involved lumberjacks several years prior picking on the “mentally hindered” son of a store owner. Their pranks inadvertently led to the boy’s death — falling from that aforementioned fire tower — followed by the men’s own mysterious slaughter. (Later, in the present time, a game warden played by Reece Presley fleshes out this history a bit further.) 

    Needless to say, our mute, relentless perp (Ry Barrett) is that wronged Johnny come back to vengeful half-life, wreaking grievous bodily harm on anyone he finds. Breaking into a ranger station, he acquires rusty tools of historical-turned-homicidal value from display cases. Subsequent mayhem is vivid, to say the least. While not all the gory prosthetic FX entirely convince, Nash’s penchant for long sustained shots encompass some coups of seamless transition between visibly intact actor and gruesome aftermath. 

    Naturally, there is a Final Girl (Andrea Pavlovic as Kris). But as we’re almost entirely locked into the undead killer’s perspective — primarily from a traveling camera position behind him as he creeps through the woods — these frequently petulant, argumentative victims never require much dimensionality. Their eventual realization that something is very wrong happens mostly off-screen, with dialogue overheard just briefly in moments before they face lethal peril.

    Aside from the aforementioned stretches of spoken backstory, the only prolonged verbal interlude comes from Lauren Taylor in a late appearance as a passing Good Samaritan. Her monologue pushes the envelope in terms of risking dissipation of the creepy atmospherics. Still, ultimately the mood of menace is sustained enough for an unsettled, eerie fadeout.

    Using an almost square aspect ratio, DP Pierce Derks makes the northern Ontario wilderness locations both lovely and sinister, with enough variety to the visual tactics that the film never gets stuck in found footage horror’s first-person-camera stylistic rut. A complete lack of any original scoring (some incidental music is heard from radios and such) mostly accentuates the tension. 

    “Violent Nature” isn’t exactly the scariest of screen horrors; it doesn’t have much in the way of humor or complexity. Yet its stripped-down approach to a familiar gist has a distinctiveness that is impressive, and is sure to please fans who are always up for a new slasher film — but wish most of them weren’t so interchangeable. 

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    Dharv2014

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  • ‘Rob Peace’ Review: Chiwetel Ejiofor Crafts a Conventional but Stirring True Story of Talent, Struggle and Tragedy

    ‘Rob Peace’ Review: Chiwetel Ejiofor Crafts a Conventional but Stirring True Story of Talent, Struggle and Tragedy

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    In his feature directorial debut, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Chiwetel Ejiofor crafted a humanizing portrait of a gifted Malawian boy who saves his village from famine by building a DIY windmill. That film — based on the true story of inventor William Kamkwamna — leaned into the conventions of inspirational movies to shape a narrative steeped in good-natured earnestness. But it also teased a portrayal of the complicated relationships between fathers and sons. 

    Ejiofor revisits this theme more forcefully in his latest directorial effort, Rob Peace, about a young man torn between the promise of his future and the responsibilities of his past. Adapted from Jeff Hobbs’ 2014 book The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, the film offers a sweeping and empathetic depiction of its central character. Through Peace’s story, Ejiofor explores the violent impact of the carceral state and the fraught interdependence of a father and his son. While largely predictable in its approach, Ejiofor’s film still evokes a genuine emotional response thanks to strong performances from its cast, especially lead Jay Will. 

    Rob Peace

    The Bottom Line

    Evokes genuine emotions despite a traditional framework.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
    Cast: Jay Will, Mary J. Blige, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Camila Cabello, Michael Kelly, Mare Winningham
    Director-screenwriter: Chiwetel Ejiofor

    1 hour 59 minutes

    The film opens in 1987 in Orange, New Jersey, where seven-year-old Robert DeShaun Peace (Jelani Dacres) eagerly awaits his father’s arrival. When the man everyone calls Skeet (played by Ejiofor) pulls up in his car, Rob leaps from the front steps and into his arms. There is mutual admiration between these two, and Ejiofor, who wrote the screenplay, underscores that with key moments of bonding. Rob looks up to his father, and Skeet sees his son as the future of their neighborhood.

    The beginning of Rob Peace also establishes the loyalty Rob feels to his hometown. Ksenia Sereda’s intimate shots of men gathering on a stoop while listening to the radio and passing around beers paint a picture of a vibrant community. This perspective is critical to understanding the tension Rob carries for the rest of his life. 

    After Skeet is convicted of a double homicide, Rob’s mother, Jackie (Mary J. Blige), doubles down on saving her son. She doesn’t want Rob to end up like his father or any of the other men in Orange. The film jumps seven years to 1994. Rob (now played by Chance K. Smith) is a student at St. Benedict’s Prep School in Newark, where he excels in his classes and plays water polo. Outside of school, the gifted student reviews the details of his father’s case. Rob knows that Skeet is innocent, and he’s determined to prove it.

    Two narratives unfold in Rob Peace: the story of Rob moving through increasingly elite spaces without losing his sense of self and the one of the same young man trying to save his father. As Rob (now played by Jay Will) moves from Orange to New Haven, where he matriculates at Yale University, Skeet never leaves his mind. He calls his father, visits him in prison and continues working to prove his innocence.

    Will deftly balances his character’s charismatic exterior with his more wounded interior. He especially plays well against Ejiofor; some of the best scenes are the increasingly charged interactions between Rob and his father. Ejiofor’s performance highlights the toll the carceral system takes on a person; Will’s offers insight into the emotional fallout of having an incarcerated loved one. 

    As Skeet becomes more desperate for his freedom, he makes demands on his son to act more quickly. Rob begins to wonder about the truth of his father’s testimony, and Will grounds his character’s growing doubt in an authentic ambivalence. It would have benefited the film to make space for more of the character’s interiority, especially as the pressure to help Skeet mounts. 

    At Yale, Rob thrives academically and socially, drawing the attention of a professor (Mare Winningham) and the admiration of his peers. It’s at Yale that Rob meets his biographer, Hobbs (Benjamin Papac), and his eventual girlfriend, Naya (Camila Cabello). But being at the school doesn’t magically solve our protagonist’s problems. Rob still needs money to pay Skeet’s legal fees. With this, Rob Peace offers an under-explored portrait of the tension faced by Black working-class students in elite institutions. Rob is surrounded by students who don’t know his dad is in prison and don’t understand the loyalty he feels to his community. 

    The decision to sell weed on campus is a practical one. Unable to help Skeet with his campus jobs, Rob decides to dip his toe in this more lucrative operation. His friends warn against it: Rich white students might be able to deal on campus without fear of consequence, but Rob is poor and Black. The rules are different. Yet without many options, the young Orange native feels he must risk it. 

    Rob Peace moves briskly. Time jumps keep the narrative moving, with Ejiofor often opting for montages backed by poignant music (by Jeff Russo) instead of letting moments play out. These shortcuts make sense for a film trying to cover so much ground, but occasionally undercut some of the more emotionally potent scenes. They especially compress the latter half of Rob’s life, leaving us with a flattened sense of the character’s motivations as he finds himself in more financial trouble. 

    Still, with Rob Peace, Ejiofor has found a subject whose life story reflects some of the most unjust realities of the United States. Throughout the film, people in Rob’s life comment on his preternatural intellect and charisma. They express excitement about his future — all visions that require him to leave East Orange. But Rob didn’t see anything wrong with his community. He had no desire to leave, and part of the tragedy of Rob Peace is that few people seemed to wonder why.

    Full credits

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
    Production companies: Republic Pictures, Hill District Media, Los Angeles Media Fund, Participant, Sugar Peace Productions, 25 Stories
    Cast: Jay Will, Mary J. Blige, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Camila Cabello, Michael Kelly, Mare Winningham
    Director-screenwriter: Chiwetel Ejiofor
    Producers: Antoine Fuqua, Rebecca Hobbs, Jeffrey Soros, Simon Horsman, Andrea Calderwood, Kat Samick, Alex Kurtzman, Jenny Lumet
    Executive producers: Mary J. Blige, Jamin O’Brien, Morgan Earnest, Luke Rodgers, Jeff Skoll, Robert Kessel, Bruce Evans, Faye Stapleton, Ali Jayazeri, David Gendron
    Director of photography: Ksenia Sereda
    Production designer: Dina Goldman-Kunin
    Costume designer: Deirdra Elizabeth Govan
    Editor: Masahiro Hirakubo
    Music: Jeff Russo
    Casting director: Alexa L. Fogel, CSA
    Sales: Republic Pictures

    1 hour 59 minutes

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    Lovia Gyarkye

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  • ‘Good One’ Review: A Carefully Measured Indie Traces How a Father-Daughter Camping Trip Goes Subtly Awry

    ‘Good One’ Review: A Carefully Measured Indie Traces How a Father-Daughter Camping Trip Goes Subtly Awry

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    As teenagers go — and let us allow for some hormonal leeway here — 17-year-old Sam is what most would call a good one: smart, thoughtful, grounded, self-sufficient but not averse to advice, the kind of kid that parents can’t help bragging about, as their friends wish their own nightmare offspring were a little more like her. But such a reputation has its downside, as elders take the teen’s compliance and good humor for granted, and expect undue allowances for their own irresponsibilities. Writer-director India Donaldson probes that awkward reversal of roles with delicacy and care in her debut feature “Good One,” monitoring the white lies and red flags that emerge over the course of a father-daughter camping weekend in upstate New York.

    Premiering in the U.S. Dramatic competition at this year’s Sundance festival, “Good One” is modest but assuredly perceptive independent filmmaking that makes no grand claims for itself over a slim 89-minute runtime. Instead, the film invites viewers to look closer, to identify consequential fault lines and points of identification in what might outwardly seem a low-stakes narrative. Perhaps it’s accidental that Donaldson’s premise recalls Kelly Reichardt’s 2006 miniature “Old Joy” as if replayed two decades on — with a new, nearly adult interloper muddling the once-comfy dynamic between two middle-aged friends on a woodsy retreat. But there’s certainly some resemblance here to the quiet, subtext-led simmer of Reichardt’s filmmaking, in which throwaway lines and actions acquire unspoken weight as hours, and then days, and perhaps even years, go by.

    But that’s getting ahead of the film and its tight three-day timeframe — a mere snapshot of longstanding relationships, but long enough to discern tensions that have been brewing, and affections that have been shifting, for quite some time. Fiftysomething contractor Chris (James Le Gros) appears to be on great terms with Sam (Lily Collias), his only child, who takes his dad jokes and occasionally clumsy lines of personal questioning with good grace; he’s a sincerely loving and interested parent, and has evidently accepted her out-and-proud queerness without difficulty. There may be flickers of pique on her part stemming from her parents’ divorce and Chris’s blameful role therein, but by and large, she’s matured and let go of youthful resentments.

    College beckons, and with it independent adulthood. The Catskills camping trip Chris and Sam are planning might just be the latest in a long family tradition of them, but there’s an air of finality to this one — a sense that their roles won’t be quite the same going forward. They’re not going alone: Chris’s oldest friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) is to join them, along with his own teenage son, though their relationship is rockier than that between Chris and Sam. At the last minute, the surly lad drops out, leaving Matt — a disheveled former actor with none of his pal’s outdoorsy skills — an ungainly third wheel on this poignant father-daughter trip.

    Sam doesn’t mind — it’s her nature not to. But there’s a growing sense of imbalance to the way these two bluff older men converse with this quiet young woman, often using her as a sounding board for their middle-aged grievances and self-pity, and praising her for her perspicacious responses in a way that feels both condescending and a little conditional. Sam is permitted, to a point, to be jovially critical of their blundering masculinity, but on their terms only: She’s either blanked or cautioned when she gets too candid for their liking.

    As the trio pick their way across rocks and rivers, their chatter rambles smoothly and cheerfully enough that you don’t initially notice how one-sided it is: A full day passes before anyone asks Sam anything meaningful about herself. And when, one night by the campfire, a jokey exchange between Sam and Matt veers discomfitingly over the line, it soon becomes clear that, despite Chris’s own growing irritation with his friend, she’s one against two — and once again expected to be the younger-but-bigger person in the face of her elders’ flaws. Donaldson’s keen-eared script deftly avoids the head-on confrontations that can be so much easier to initiate in the movies than in life, as the characters instead test and admonish each other via passive-aggressive gestures and politely loaded observations.

    First seen two years ago in a secondary role in “Palm Trees and Power Lines,” Collias impresses in a role that doesn’t grant her any great extremes of expression. Sam’s temperate demeanor may simply be her nature, but Collias’s tautly wired performance shows how it’s also a defense; Wilson Cameron’s camera gazes at her long enough in soft, sun-dappled closeup that we eventually see the clenched muscles behind the calm. A superb Le Gros mirrors her composure while also enjoying the luxury of outward-facing, alpha-male surges of anger and irritation; McCarthy offers a louder slacker loucheness that gradually creates more tension than it breaks.

    The friction between these three conflicting energies builds to a climax that some viewers might find unduly low-key — an open-ended impasse perhaps more characteristic of short film structure — but that also feels true to the characters and their ongoing lives. It takes more than a weekend for a “good one” to assert their more demanding complications, but Donaldson’s sly, watchful debut brings Sam to the brink of something — not just adulthood, but a revised view of her childhood, a realization more seismic than any shouting match.

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    Guy Lodge

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  • ‘Seeking Mavis Beacon’ Review: Thoughtful Doc Pursues an Elusive Black Icon

    ‘Seeking Mavis Beacon’ Review: Thoughtful Doc Pursues an Elusive Black Icon

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    Jazmin Renée Jones’ “Seeking Mavis Beacon” isn’t your typical kind of quest movie. Premiering in the NEXT section at Sundance, the format-defying film follows the nonbinary Black filmmaker on an elaborate search to find — but also to better understand — someone who shaped what they thought of the world and themselves. Someone who didn’t really exist: the cover model for popular 1987 computer program “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.”

    As past users of the bestselling software surely recall (but may never have consciously considered), Mavis Beacon was a Black woman — knowledgeable and warm, with a striking face and long, elegant fingernails — who encouraged young people to master their keyboard skills. She served as a virtual teacher and confidant for countless kids, including Jones and computer prodigy Olivia McKayla Ross (credited here as an associate producer, though Jones refers to her on camera as “my collaborator”).

    An early example of AI, Mavis Beacon was an invention of three white male computer programmers. Why did they choose a Black woman as their avatar? “I would like to claim that back in 1987, we were totally woke,” says one of these (well-compensated) tech pioneers when Jones puts the question to him. The truth, which the film eventually manages to uncover, was far less strategic.

    Mavis Beacon’s face belonged to a Haitian woman named Renee L’Espérance, spotted behind the counter at a California department store. Jones interviews multiple people about that discovery, and each remembers it differently. But there’s no denying the impact it had on Jones and Ross — and who knows how many others? While the filmmakers are obviously obsessed with Mavis Beacon, who among us hasn’t fixated on a figure from our childhoods (whether a fictional avatar or flesh-and-blood celebrity)? Jones’ feat comes from making what matters to her, matter for everyone watching.

    Bending the conventional rules of moviemaking, Jones brings a fresh generational perspective to the project. Both she and Ross are young people comfortable with the proliferation and dominance of technology in their lives, to the extent that they make virtual heroes of symbols within their computers. Rather than taking a positive or negative stance on technology, they explore a range of philosophical and sociological considerations, from the notion of “coded bias” to how they personally use technology to communicate and find community.

    Ross’ description of herself as a “cyber doula,” committed to helping others use digital tools, is her specific way of trying to make technology friendlier. It’s apt that Jones finds inspiration in Cheryl Dunye’s seminal 1996 queer quest film “The Watermelon Woman,” another narrative about trying to find one’s hero.

    As Jones’ search brings her closer to L’Espérance, she addresses complex themes in assured, economical ways: the exploitation of Black women to support and guide others to success, the ramifications of who owns our digital footprints and, most importantly, who gets credit for what when something becomes a huge success. Jones believes that L’Espérance never got what she deserved, despite being a major reason the software was so successful, while the woman who found her got pushed out of the picture as well. The movie seeks to correct these oversights.

    As L’Espérance proves elusive even for diligent and committed investigators like Jones and Ross, the film finds itself in a quandary. The quest meant to find Mavis Beacon, but it is also about the filmmakers and what matters most to them. Jones shares how such a single-minded pursuit can consume one’s life, while the film falls in a cycle of repetitive actions. That may be true to the way such research happens, but it doesn’t make for an especially entertaining sit.

    Jones and Ross may not have yet met their idol, yet the journey chronicled in “Seeking Mavis Beacon” is affecting and haunting. In pursuing a Don Quixote-like goal, they uncover surprising details along the way about subjects that obsess them. As investigators, they are tenacious and relentless; as filmmakers they are exciting and determined.

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    Peter Debruge

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  • ‘Exhibiting Forgiveness’ Review: Art, Emotion, And The Journey Of Self-Healing – Sundance Film Festival

    ‘Exhibiting Forgiveness’ Review: Art, Emotion, And The Journey Of Self-Healing – Sundance Film Festival

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    Exhibiting Forgiveness, directed and written by Titus Kaphar, is a thought-provoking film starring Andre Holland, John Earl Jelks, Andra Day, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and Ian Foreman. Set against a backdrop of familial struggle and personal demons, Kaphar’s film navigates the complexities of forgiveness, accountability, and the resilience of the human spirit.

    Tarrell Rodin (Holland), a loving father and husband who resides in the suburbs with his wife Aisha (Day), a singer-songwriter, and their son Jermaine. Renowned in the American art scene for his haunting, personal work, Tarrell dedicates his days to his art studio, using painting to turn his nightmares into art. His devotion to art, coupled with the support of his family and his diligent work ethic, has helped him keep his ugly past at a distance. He aims to take care of his mother Joyce (Ellis-Taylor) and wants to get her out of the neighborhood she lives in, but she’s apprehensive as she wants to stay close to her church. Its only a temporary move nit deep down he hopes Joyce in hopes she can provide support as he struggles with old memories. 

    Life officially unravels when his abusive Father La’Ron (Jelks) appears in his life, free from drugs and alcohol and asking for another chance. Tarrell didn’t ask for any of this. Against his well, Joyce went behind his back to plan this reunion in hopes of putting their family back together again. Now, Tarrell must manage his emotion now that his abuser is back in his life, and put in the work to rectify the past in order to move on to the present to transform generational trauma, into generational healing. 

    There is something to be said for the level of denial that exists among elders in the Black community. Joyce is dealing with hidden issues that she is in denial about. La’ron with bible and explaining away his past. How is Terrell supposed to find closure when dealing with people who cant even be honest? 

    Black men are taught to be unfeeling, unemotional, work through the pain. Titus’s puts it on display to show how cycles of abuse perpetuate themselves, and how there is power in stopping that cycle. There is an appreciation for a Tarell who refuses to be gaslit, and sticks up for himself. Shows emotion when he feels it, and does all the things he wasn’t allowed to do as a young boy. 

    Exhibiting Forgiveness distinguishes itself with a soulful and contemplative score by Jherek Bischoff, and music by Andra Day mirror the nuanced direction of Kaphar. This artistic choice beautifully complements the performances of its talented cast. Holland, Ellis-Taylor, and Day, who are recognized as some of the finest actors in the industry today. Their portrayal in the film is both powerful and emotionally resonant, contributing significantly to the film’s overall impact.

    The issues lie in Kaphar’s narrative. The audience sits through so many traumatic moments and then is asked to find optimism in the experience which may work for some and not for others as it’s just not a simple choice. Maybe it would have worked for me if it were balanced by more levity, but it isn’t. It’s a constant beating. 

    Do those who have committed harsh transgressions have the capacity for good? Sure, but it doesn’t erase their past because accountability has to be taken somewhere. However, Exhibiting Forgiveness proves you do not need other people’s acknowledgement or approval to find forgiveness within yourself.

    It’s ok to find something like art or the bible that helps in the healing process, but that can’t be all. You have to do the work. Giving yourself that grace is so powerful because if not that pain will trickle into other aspects of your life and the cycle will continue. We have to strive to be different than those who came before us. 

    Title: Exhibiting Forgiveness
    Festival Section): U.S. Dramatic Competition
    Director(s): Titus Kaphar
    Screenwriter(s): Titus Kaphar
    Cast: Andre Holland, John Earl Jelks, Andra Day, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
    Running time: 1 hr 57 min

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    Valerie Complex

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  • ‘Love Machina’ Review: Provocative but Unfocused Doc Tackles Romance and Robotics

    ‘Love Machina’ Review: Provocative but Unfocused Doc Tackles Romance and Robotics

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    If you follow the news, you’d think that AI is going to take over every activity we formerly thought of as “human,” perhaps by the time you finish reading this sentence.

    One of the great pleasures of reviewing documentaries, though, is that every few months a new film will pull back the curtain on the latest advancement in artificial intelligence or consciousness-infused robotics. Fairly consistently, the answer is: “Nah. People are safe. For now.”

    Love Machina

    The Bottom Line

    Intriguing but scattered.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Documentary Competition)
    Director: Peter Sillen

    1 hour and 36 minutes

    For now.

    The latest documentary to enter this fray is Peter Sillen’s Love Machina, a jumbled and easily distracted meditation on artificial intelligence, robotics, love, immortality, transformation and a form of spirituality that combines all of those things.

    This is a subgenre in which any filmmaker will have to confront a series of what look like binaries, but increasingly aren’t: Visionary or crackpot? Science or science fiction? Utopian vision of the future or warning of an approaching dystopian nightmare? A storyteller can answer those questions or leave it for the audience to decide. Sillen falls squarely in the fuzzy in-between, both amazed by what he keeps uncovering and aware that there are counterpoints that need to be presented, even if he leans much more into the former.

    Whether this slightly wishy-washy form of curiosity is a feature or a bug will depend, as ever, on the predisposition of the viewer. But Sillen, like his documentary’s primary subjects, definitely leads with his heart.

    Our primary heroes are Martine and Bina Rothblatt, married for 40 years. They’re really, really, really in love, in a way that’s beautiful and just a wee bit creepy — especially when they refer to themselves with the portmanteau “MarBina” and describe themselves as, “Two bodies, one soul, forever in love.” It’s just intense.

    Now lots of people are intensely in love, but not a lot of people are as brilliant as Martine Rothblatt, who is a futurist, a lawyer, an entrepreneur, a biotechnology innovator and an expert in satellite technologies. She founded SiriusXM. Tapping into what is presumably an ungodly amount of personal wealth, Martine and Bina launched the Terasem Movement, a transhumanist organization with its roots in the work of Octavia Butler (because no school of thought based on the writings of a science-fiction author has ever been strange and problematic).

    The primary project of Terasem appears to be Bina48, a disembodied robotic head with a vague resemblance to Bina and an algorithmic intelligence based on Bina’s so-called “mind file.” The latter is a virtual upload of Bina’s thoughts, experiences and memories compiled from testing and interviews, and filtered through various AI systems, some proprietary and others not. Real Bina is smart, lively and deeply in love with Martine. Bina48 is a dead-eyed, strangely styled miracle, capable of affectless recitations of things that Real Bina told various engineers over a multi-decade process.

    Martine and Bina are certain that their future, and possibly the future of all humanity, is in the stars. They are convinced that if human consciousness can be captured on a hard drive, Bina will be able to live on either in a much more advanced robotic ancestor to Bina48 or in her own body, which will be cryogenically frozen after her death. What about Martine’s consciousness? The documentary gives no answers, but Martine is her own embodiment of the transmutation of human identity, as a trans woman, an interesting personal journey that Love Machina discusses, but not with the depth or intelligence it deserves.

    The Rothblatts’ certainty is unwavering. Terasem may not be an actual cult, but their techno-zealotry certainly has cult-like elements that make them frequently off-putting. Especially since they speak in a love language that is at least half jargon, jargon that then comes out of Bina48’s latex mouth. Is this thing they’re trying to do actually plausible? All evidence still points to “Not right now,” though Love Machina is also full of evidence that this is a realm in which the acceleration of advancement is nearly as terrifying as Bina48 herself.

    Sillen is able to find some people — Stephanie Dinkins, a professor at Stony Brook University is worthy of a doc all her own — prepared to speak to the practical limitations of believing that any quantity of data could ever reproduce consciousness, and willing to broach how problematic it is that Bina48 is an avatar of a Black woman constructed almost wholly by white men. That’s the “could” of the equation. Nobody wants to talk about the “should.” It’s like Jurassic Park never even happened.

    Perhaps sensing that Martine and Bina’s romantic fanaticism is both the doc’s strongest aspect and potentially its most unnerving, Siller weaves their love story through the full film but keeps detouring for a depth-free progression down a futurist checklist. Robotics designer David Hanson, star of 2022’s very, very similar Sophia, is featured. Mike Perry, of cryogenics behemoth Alcor, is a distracting presence, especially if you know him as the gentleman who revealed a very shocking secret in the series finale of How To With John Wilson. Sillen is constantly introducing us to people who seem both fascinating and like they needed to be asked a lot more follow-up questions.

    Bina48 is described as a work-in-progress and Love Machina ultimately comes across as an idea-in-progress. It’s provocative enough to recognize a lot of the conversations we need to have now rather than after the robots have taken over, but not coherent enough to adequately have those conversations itself.

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    Daniel Fienberg

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  • River Gallo is Ready to Conquer Sundance With Bold Intersex Crime Drama ‘Ponyboi’

    River Gallo is Ready to Conquer Sundance With Bold Intersex Crime Drama ‘Ponyboi’

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    The Sundance Film Festival prides itself on being a place of innovation and discovery, and this year’s 40th anniversary celebration has an entry that could well check both boxes – “Ponyboi,” a genre-blending road movie featuring writer and star River Gallo.

    Gallo plays the titular Ponyboi, an intersex sex worker hustling to survive in New Jersey. His days are spent with pregnant best friend Angel (Victoria Pedretti) working a strip mall laundromat; his nights with his secret lover and aspiring pimp, Angel’s baby’s father Vinnie (Dylan O’Brien). As it often happens on the turnpike, things go south when some tainted crystal meth and a dead mafioso spin Ponyboi’s fragile world into chaos, forcing him to confront his demons.

    Gallo is writer and star on the project. A pedigreed artist who came up through USC and the Sundance labs, they are intersex and identify as non-binary and trans fem using they/them pronouns. In addition to weaving elements of crime, action and gritty comedy, the film provides a rare lens into the intersex experience. Gallo says they were raised as a “normal” boy, but at age 12 their parents disclosed they were born with a condition called Anochria, where testicles are absent at birth. Without Gallo’s consent, they underwent cosmetic surgery and testosterone treatment to present as a cisgender man.

    Having spent years hiding their true identity, Gallo brings the full force of their history to “Ponyboi,” which stokes an important and unprecedented conversation about a spectrum of acceptable masculinity and femininity and the pressure for certain queer people to assimilate. Ahead of Saturday’s world premiere, Variety caught up with Gallo for a roving conversation about their looming breakout moment.

    This project was made with a Sundance grant. Did you come up through the labs here?

    I was a part of the inaugural Trans Possibilities Intensive in 2021, specifically for trans and non-binary filmmakers. They helped, certainly with giving mentorship on my script and with a grant. It was nice to have the Sundance Institute’s involvement from the development phase, especially as an emerging artist. It gives you hope that your work will come to fruition.

    Where did this idea begin?

    This started as a theater piece during my undergraduate program at NYU. It was a 10-minute piece that evolved into a 40-minute performance art piece. The character wasn’t called Ponyboi at the time, but it was centered around a queer sex worker in New Jersey who was grappling with his identity. it was a lot weirder, a more John Waters aesthetic. I was at a place where art was the only way for me to gain a deeper understanding of myself. Later, I translated it into a short film when I went to USC. It was just a story that I couldn’t shake off still.

    I came to a place where I wanted to talk about my medical history and being intersex. It wasn’t something that I knew the words for. Also, there hadn’t been any intersex narrative films before. I was shocked by that.

    The lens around queer and trans identities in indie movies is often sad or hopeless. But you do an amazing job of bringing in elements of comedy and action on top of a larger emotional struggle. I was also fascinated by the role of hormones in this story – what kind the character chooses to take and why. The people around him have very specific motives in how they want Ponyboi to present.

    Thank you. When I came out as intersex and, later, non-binary and trans fem, I realized that had to be a part of the discourse of the movie. So many queer stories are focused on either the coming out or the transition — and the pain involved in that. I wanted to make something more nuanced and complex. The conversation has evolved. There’s a scene between my character and Indya Moore’s that strikes me as vital or medicinal for the culture. It’s talking about the difference between being intersex and being trans and the expectations that people have of either community.

    People do want Ponyboi to be one thing, and perhaps Ponyboi has a curiously to be a singular thing. What he finds is that maybe it’s OK to be in a state of confusion and indecision. That is natural and beautiful. That’s not exclusive to queer cinema, it’s a universal story. Being more intimate with uncertainty and the process of “becoming: becomes really cool.

    Indya is so impactful with a very brief part. You’ve got an incredible cast for a first-time feature, Dylan O’Brien and Victoria Pedretti and Murray Bartlett, too. How did they come on board?

    Murray had seen my short in 2019 at Tribeca, he had a friend [in the festival] at the same time. He messaged me shortly after. When my director pitched him for the role he plays in “Ponyboi,” he was filming “The Last of Us.” It’s wild, the seeds you can plant as a student filmmaker. Victoria became a good friend of mine because we’re both repped at Management 360.

    Dylan was the last one to come on board. We faced a lot of challenges with that role. We had to find someone that wasn’t afraid of the subject matter considering the sensitivity that a lot of actors feel around telling stories that involve identities or communities that aren’t always represented. There is fear and trepidation around that. The character needed to be someone that could bring levity and playfulness and humor, and also be legitimately scary. I was really conscious when I wrote that role, making sure that he was as human as possible and not just a two dimensional. I feel like Ponyboi and Dylan’s character Vinnie are both anti-heroes. That’s what I love about their dynamic.

    I fell out of my chair during the scene when he started rapping.

    He wrote that himself. I just had placeholder notes in the script. He made it up, and it was actually so much better than anything I could do.

    Did you help Victoria with her amazing New Jersey accent?

    She’s from also from Philly, so she knows what she’s doing. She grew up going to the Jersey Shore. We also used the same dialect coach, so she really brought it. Her character Angel is another one where, you think you know that girl. She’s ditsy but in the end, she surprises you, she becomes the hero of the movie in a way.

    What are you looking to do next, creatively?

    I’m writing my next feature film that I definitely want to star in, but also looking toward directing. I want to wear all those hats. I had an amazing director on this, but it was so hard for me to release control of certain things because I had such a sharp vision in mind when writing “Ponyboi.” I’m ready to start directing. Aside from that, I’d also like to return to the stage. I started in theater. Broadway was always my biggest dream, so I would like to properly do stage acting.

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    Varietymattdonnelly

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  • In the biographical drama ‘Rob Peace,’ Chiwetel Ejiofor reframes a life

    In the biographical drama ‘Rob Peace,’ Chiwetel Ejiofor reframes a life

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    PARK CITY, Utah — PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — Chiwetel Ejiofor had read Jeff Hobbs’ “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace” years before Antoine Fuqua asked if he might consider writing and directing an adaptation.

    The book, which explores the complex life of a brilliant boy who grew up in the crime ridden and blighted East Orange, New Jersey, was written by Peace’s old Yale roommate. His story did not fit neatly into familiar tropes about rough beginnings, incarcerated fathers or overly simplistic ideas about success and “getting out.” This was a person who wanted to remain tied to his community, to his father, and also to succeed in his schooling and athletics (water polo) first at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark and then at Yale where he studied molecular biochemistry and biophysics.

    Nine years after he graduated from university, in which he spent time teaching at his old prep school, traveled extensively, considered grad school and made money selling marijuana, Peace was killed. Some of the narratives chalked it up to the fact that he went back to where he came from. Ejiofor said Peace’s mother told them that in the aftermath of his death, television crews came and filmed the garbage on the streets instead of the community.

    But Hobbs and, subsequently, Ejiofor saw something more complicated and nuanced about the flawed idea of “social mobility” and about the “confluence of race, housing, education and the criminal justice system.” And, most importantly, he felt like he hadn’t seen these ideas engaged with in film.

    “I thought it was very special and very powerful,” Ejiofor told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “It was sort of coincidental that I had had this big response to the book, but I hadn’t pursued it in any way. I jumped at the opportunity.”

    Fuqua, who had teamed up with Hobbs’ wife, Rebecca, to adapt the film, thought Ejiofor would be the right person after seeing his feature debut, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” about a 13-year-old boy in Malawi who gets inventive after his family can no longer afford school.

    “I knew it was meant to be a film,” Antoine Fuqua wrote in an email. “It was clear that (Chiwetel’s) humanistic approach to storytelling was a perfect fit to bring Rob’s life to screen.”

    “Rob Peace” is having its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday, where it hopes to find a distributor to get it out to the world.

    “Movies like this need to be loved into existence, and that takes a village,” said producer Alex Kurtzman, who got close to Ejiofor while directing him in “The Man Who Fell to Earth” series. “You don’t make movies like this for money. You don’t make movies like this for any reason other than this is an important story to tell. And some reason, we are lucky enough to be able to tell it.”

    To play Rob, who would have to carry the film and live in the very different worlds he traversed in his life, Ejiofor and his casting director found Jay Will, a recent Juilliard graduate.

    “I never felt that it was a story about somebody who was able to play a role in different places,” Ejiofor said. “It was a story about somebody who very naturally and consistently was all of these things at once. You really had to invest and believe that about him. Jay very naturally did that because that’s part of his experience as well. He’s also just a fabulous actor and has this great charisma and real charm.”

    The performance is a meaty showcase for a fresh face who had done some television, including “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and Taylor Sheridan’s “Tulsa King,” which had not yet come out.

    Mary J. Blige was already on board to play his mother, Jackie, and Camila Cabello plays an on and off girlfriend Naya. Ejiofor cast himself in the role of the father, Skeet, self-aware enough to know that because it was in his wheelhouse, he’d just be directing another actor to play him as he would.

    “He’s kind of a of mercurial character in a way,” Ejiofor said. “There has to be a sequence of question marks about him, but you also have to be very compelled by him. And Rob’s journey is pulled by that sort of magnetic link he has to this to his father.”

    As with “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” the director-actor, father-son dynamic actually ended up helping the film, too.

    Kurtzman marveled at Ejiofor’s ability to elegantly and calmly navigate three very different roles — writer, director and actor — under the high pressure environment of making a low-budget indie in just 28 days with no money for overtime.

    “I never saw him crack, break, get stressed ever,” Kurtzman said. “That he was able to hold space for all of those three things at the same time and know how to put them in a box while the clock was ticking, that’s a true artist.”

    Equally important to Ejiofor was to make the film look beautiful. He’d been appalled by the story of the TV crews and the garbage and sought out “Beanpole” and “The Last of Us” cinematographer Ksenia Sereda to realize this vision.

    “What she’s done here is elevated this with a real elegance and beauty and a style of telling the story, which doesn’t necessarily feel like we’ve seen before within this kind of cinematic experience,” he said.

    All of these facets work together to upend stereotypes and expectations. Ejiofor wants audiences to have a sense of hope in Rob’s story as well as to feel enriched by knowing him.

    “By the end of the film, you’re not just left with this bleakness. It’s obviously a tragic story, but it’s much, much richer than that,” he said. “Understanding his journey, I think, is profoundly important and enriching and enlightening. It has been for me.”

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  • ‘The Greatest Night in Pop’ Review: Lionel Richie Is an Engaging Guide Through the Historic Star Cluster Behind “We Are the World”

    ‘The Greatest Night in Pop’ Review: Lionel Richie Is an Engaging Guide Through the Historic Star Cluster Behind “We Are the World”

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    At one point as the supergroup dubbed “USA for Africa” was assembling on January 28, 1985, at A&M Recording Studios in Hollywood, Paul Simon reportedly joked, “If a bomb lands on this place, John Denver’s back on top.” Such was the magnitude of mid-‘80s music luminaries on hand, everyone from Diana Ross, Dionne Warwick and Tina Turner through Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel and beyond. Unless you’ve spent your whole life under a rock, sometime or other, the resulting charity single, “We Are the World,” has likely gotten stuck in your head. The song achieved instant global saturation, selling out the initial run of a million copies in the first weekend of its release.

    Of course, this is pre-downloads, so we’re talking actual vinyl sales, and it’s audiences with fond recollections of those analog days and the music stars who dominated the charts during the period that will eat up The Greatest Night in Pop, a celebratory Netflix doc about the making of the song.

    The Greatest Night in Pop

    The Bottom Line

    Nectar for nostalgists.

    Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Special Screenings)
    Release date: Monday, January 29
    With: Lionel Richie, Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis, Smokey Robinson, Kenny Loggins, Dionne Warwick
    Director: Bao Nguyen

    1 hour 37 minutes

    Directed by Bao Nguyen, whose similarly archive-rich study of the life and career of Bruce Lee, Be Water, premiered at Sundance in 2020, the conventionally straightforward film isn’t exactly packed with unexpected revelations. That is, unless you count Waylon Jennings bailing when Stevie Wonder started lobbying to sing a chorus in Swahili, or Sheila E., probably with good cause, feeling she was being exploited as leverage to get to Prince, which didn’t work. But, as recounted by the song’s co-writer, Lionel Richie, producer Quincy Jones and others who were part of the recording, it’s an engaging blitz of nostalgia guaranteed to leave core viewers misty-eyed.

    The song was hatched in the immediate wake of the similar U.K. endeavor that birthed the charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” That smash hit was sung by a platoon of British and Irish music stars known as Band Aid, assembled by Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, of Visage and Ultravox. The proceeds of that song went to famine relief in Ethiopia, at that time probably the most pressing humanitarian crisis in the world.

    Harry Belafonte, who was not only music and movie royalty but an elder statesman of civil rights and social activism, recognized the glaring Band Aid optics of “white folks saving Black folks.” Richie quotes him as saying, “We don’t have Black folks saving Black folks. That’s a problem.”

    Once the initial idea of an all-star concert transitioned to a recording based on the Brit model, Richie was brought in by well-connected music manager Ken Kragen to write the song along with Jones to produce. They originally wanted Wonder to co-write but when he remained unreachable, with the clock ticking — remember this was before cellphones and email — they turned to Michael Jackson instead.

    Richie and Jackson were old friends from their Motown days, when the former led The Commodores and the latter was the breakout star of The Jackson 5. As Richie recalls it, their collaborative efforts at Jackson’s home were littered with stalled attempts and weird animal encounters before they finally cooked up an ideally catchy song with a built-in uplift, just in the nick of time before the scheduled recording.

    Once big names started signing on, others quickly followed, and most of the key holdouts had the valid excuse of being on tour elsewhere. Or of being incompatible with others in the room. One insider notes they could get Cyndi Lauper or Madonna, not both together. Prince was ruled out after he demanded a guitar solo to be recorded in a separate room, declining to mingle with the starry throng, a requirement on which Jones insisted.

    If you’re hoping for some shade between Jackson and Prince you won’t find it here, beyond footage of The Purple One triumphing at the American Music Awards in categories where they were both competing. But glimpses of Jackson on the night of the recording are kind of poignant, showing him in his own eccentric bubble, trying out different phrasing and wording in his sweet vocal tones.

    The time-sensitive nature of the project stemmed from the need to make the recording happen the same night as the AMAs, when so many big names were in town. Richie was also hosting the awards that year (not to mention winning a handful) and while there’s no self-glorification in his recollections, his “All Night Long” stamina — sorry, couldn’t resist — seems remarkable. Up until stars started rolling up at A&M around 10 p.m., Richie and Jones weren’t sure who would show. The actual recording wrapped around 7 a.m. the following day.

    While it would perhaps have been interesting to know more about the session musicians who worked on the track, the doc gleans input from the recording engineer and vocal arranger, as well as the cameraman hired to shoot the music video — all of them offering their services gratis, even if not everyone knew that in advance.

    Music geeks will enjoy the discussion of how the solo lines were allocated and the running order established. In many cases, that involved contrasting styles, like Springsteen’s “dirty” sound followed by Kenny Loggins’ “clean” vocals, or Turner’s low notes and Steve Perry’s high range, or Lauper’s raucous power segueing into Kim Carnes’ gravelly rasp. Just the challenge of blending, say, Warwick’s velvet sophistication with Willie Nelson’s down-home warmth made for an intricate production challenge.

    Springsteen, Warwick, Lauper and Loggins are among the surviving participating artists wistfully looking back in newly filmed interviews, along with Smokey Robinson and Huey Lewis, who is both stoked and nervous to be handed Prince’s solo spot. 

    Lewis at one point observes that Jones had to be both producer and psychiatrist to keep such a diverse panoply of artists focused. To that end, his master strokes would appear to have been posting a notice that read, “Check your ego at the door,” and bringing in Geldof, just back from a tour of Ethiopia, to remind everyone of their purpose with a sobering account of the deprivation he had witnessed there.

    There’s talk of Jones “putting out fires,” and certainly evidence of people in the room growing tired and impatient as the night wore on. But any real drama remains undocumented. Mostly, tensions seem to have been defused with humor. Wonder’s insistent Swahili idea prompts someone to tell him, “Stevie, they don’t speak Swahili in Ethiopia.” And Dylan looks utterly miserable until Wonder shows his gift for mimicry by singing a phrase Bob Dylan-style, showing the veteran folk-rock troubadour how he might find a way in.

    What will be touching for most fans are the moments of communal spirit, such as a tipsy Al Jarreau leading everyone in a rousing “Day-O’ singalong as a tribute to Belafonte. Just watching Ray Charles beam with joy is magic.

    Editors Nic Zimmermann, Will Znidaric and David Brodie do a tidy job threading together the reams of archival material into a brisk 90 minutes and change, including footage from the AMAs, and from music videos and concerts of the era, in addition to extensive video from the recording studio, where Richie returns to do his present-day interviews. There’s also a lovely series of black and white hangout shots on the end credits, which is the first time the song is heard in its entirety.

    Nobody is making a case for “We Are the World” as a masterwork of pop songwriting craftsmanship, but Springsteen sums it up by calling it less an aesthetic creation than a tool to accomplish something. The message of collective compassion, of helping those less fortunate, is quite moving. The fact that the song has raised $80 million to date for humanitarian causes in Africa — double that in today’s dollars —speaks for itself.

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    David Rooney

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  • Malia Obama Goes Hollywood – Screens Her Own Movie At Sundance

    Malia Obama Goes Hollywood – Screens Her Own Movie At Sundance

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    Opinion

    Source: Page Six YouTube

    Malia Obama, the daughter of the former President Barack Obama, is reportedly trying to make it in Hollywood, as she resurfaced at the Sundance Film Festival this week to screen her short film The Heart.

    Malia’s New Movie

    The Hollywood Reporter stated that Malia, 25, wrote and directed the project under the name “Malia Ann,” and the short is about a grieving son grappling with an unusual request his mother left for him in her will.

    “The film is about lost objects and lonely people and forgiveness and regret, but I also think it works hard to uncover where tenderness and closeness can exist in these things,” Malia said in a video promoting the film.

    “The folks who came together to make this film have my heart, pun intended. And I’m incredibly grateful to them for giving this story life. And we are grateful to Sundance for giving us the opportunity to share it with you all,” she added. “We hope that you enjoy the film and that it makes you feel a bit less lonely or at least reminds you not to forget about the people who are.”

    Check out her full comments in the video below.

    Related: Michelle Obama Claims She Worries About Her Daughters Whenever They Get In A Car Because They’re Black

    Malia’s Red Carpet Debut

    People Magazine reported that Malia appeared at the red carpet for the film festival, which is held at the Prospector Square Theater in Park City, Utah. There, she was seen wearing a gray maxi coat, white button-down shirt and black jeans along with a gray scarf and brown boots.

    Malia has long been trying to make it in Hollywood, and she previously worked as a writer on the Prime Video thriller series “Swarm.”

    “Some of her pitches were wild as hell, and they were just so good and so funny,” the program’s show runner Janine Nabers told Entertainment Tonight of Malia last year. “She’s an incredible writer. She brought a lot to the table… She’s really, really dedicated to her craft.”

    Malia was hired for “Swarm” by Donald Glover, who both starred in and produced it.

    “I feel like she’s just somebody who’s gonna have really good things coming soon,” he told Vanity Fair of Malia in 2022. “Her writing style is great.”

    Related: Michelle Obama Describes Having Children As A ‘Concession’ That Cost Her Her ‘Dreams’

    Malia’s History With Harvey Weinstein

    It should be noted that during her time attending Harvard University, Malia worked as an intern for the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein before his sexual assault scandal broke. TMZ reported at the time that Malia was “ensconced in the production/development department,” tasked with “reading through scripts and deciding which ones move on to Weinstein brass.”

    Time Magazine reported that Weinstein contributed more than $70,000 to Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, according to FEC documents. He’d also donated $3,000 to former President Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign in 2000 and more than $26,000 to campaigns or political action committees backing 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton since 2000, according to Business Insider.

    Weinstein was later convicted of raping multiple women and is currently serving a 23 year prison sentence. Malia has never spoken out publicly about her time working for him.

    Given how much the liberal world of Hollywood has been fawning over the entire Obama family for years, it should come as no surprise that Malia is already being given the opportunity to direct her own movies. What do you think about this? Let us know in the comments section.

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