If it takes doing an MCU movie, with all the corporate constrictions that entails, to plunge into the kind of exhilarating creative exorcism that Freaky Tales represents, then bring on the superhero as stepping-stone. Before they made Captain Marvel, longtime filmmaking duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck established their talents with three boldly idiosyncratic indies, Half Nelson, Sugar and Mississippi Grind. But nothing in those distinctive works can prepare you for the kinetic energy, the freewheeling imagination and the righteous battles — we’re talking rap and some serious blade slice-and-dice — of their love letter to the Bay Area and the pop-cultural imprint it left on Fleck as a kid in the ‘80s.
The tales of the title are four chapters all built around the theme of underdog victory, each of them different in texture and tone yet all ingeniously interconnected and all owing something to the big-screen aesthetics of the time.
Freaky Tales
The Bottom Line
Lives up to the title and then some.
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres) Cast: Pedro Pascal, Jay Ellis, Ben Mendelsohn, Jack Champion, Ji-young Yoo, Dominique Thorne, Normani, Symba, Jordan “StunnaMan02” Gomes, Angus Cloud, Kier Gilchrist Director-screenwriters: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck
1 hour 47 minutes
The stories are stuffed to the gills with specific references to Oakland in the era, from local rapper cameos to beloved landmarks like Giant Burger, the Berkeley punk music venue at 924 Gilman St., the Grand Lake movie palace, Sweet Jimmie’s ice cream parlor and the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum, where Golden State Warriors point guard “Sleepy” Floyd beat the Lakers with a record-breaking final-quarter score. But Freaky Tales is 100 percent user-friendly also to non-natives and non-hoops fans.
Then there’s the flurry of movie references. Boden and Fleck have cited Repo Man, The Decline of Western Civilization, Hollywood Shuffle, The Last Dragon and Scanners as inspirations. The mark of those films can be detected throughout, perhaps most amusingly in the mysterious, possibly alien green light source that charges the East Bay atmosphere and might be connected to a fictional self-help plan called Psytopics. Ubiquitous advertising claims that this mindfulness program will teach its participants how to control the force around them and use it to change their lives.
The ample carnage has its roots in kung fu but then knives, swords and an ax are brought to the party in an astonishingly choreographed final act in which the gushing fountains of blood and viscera become almost operatic. The sticky end of a magnificently odious villain is a direct homage both to David Cronenberg and to a John Cassavetes scene that might make even Brian De Palma finally love The Fury.
Animation, comic strip-style graphics and retro-vibe fonts are used to great effect, starting with a fun title sequence that looks like it’s been kicking around a projection booth for 40 years.
Chapter 1 is titled Strength in Numbers: The Gilman Strikes Back. Tina (Ji-young Yoo, divine) and her lovelorn friend Lucid (Jack Champion) are regulars at the club, where everybody looks hardcore with their piercings and spiked leather accessories, but the sign on the door vetoing racism, sexism, homophobia and violence makes it clear this is a welcoming place. However, that doesn’t extend to the mob of Nazi skinheads that descend to wreck the joint and rough up its patrons. That brutal experience prompts some expedited fight training and creative weaponry as they armor up for some serious retaliation.
In Chapter 2, Don’t Fight the Feeling, Barbie (Dominique Thorne) and Entice (Normani), aka Danger Zone, are scooping ice cream until they graduate from open-mic rap nights to the big time. They get what appears to be their chance when they’re invited to perform on a bill with local legend Too $hort (Symba), until a rude awakening indicates they’ve been set up for humiliation in a rap battle. But don’t underestimate the power of two disrespected women to respond with fire to unreconstructed ‘80s sexism. (The real Too $hort, whose song of the same name gives the movie its title, pops up briefly.)
A brilliantly cast Pedro Pascal steps in as crime-world debt collector Clint in Chapter 3, Born to Mack (another Too $hort reference). He’s about to become a father when a violent act from his past comes back to haunt him and it subsequently becomes clear that the unscrupulous boss for whom he works isn’t going to let him walk away. But no sooner has Clint decided it’s as good a day as any to die than he finds a reason to rethink that idea. Pascal’s late-night video store scene with a major-name star whose movies are the subject of droll riffs is a sweet surprise.
Chapter 4, The Legend of Sleepy Floyd, casts the blindingly charismatic Jay Ellis as the NBA All-Star, recapping his aforementioned triumph on the court with some cool animation. But it’s the jaw-dropping fictional developments after the game, when tragedy strikes and the Psytopics advocate suits up for some biblical-level retribution that will pave the way for Freaky Tales to become an instant cult classic. If Ellis’ career doesn’t rocket into a whole new orbit after this, then Hollywood just isn’t paying attention.
Every aspect of this movie works in deliriously loopy sync. That applies to Jac Fitzgerald’s invigorating camerawork, to a score by Raphael Saddiq that gets bigger and ballsier as the filmmakers up the suspense, and to production design and costumes by Patti Podesta and Neishea Lemle, respectively, that evoke the milieu and the period with a love that’s infectious. Freaky Tales is a project where every scene suggests what a blast they all had making it.
The performances are fully on board with the gonzo spirit right down the line. Alongside Ellis and Pascal, whose gift for combining soulfulness with tough-guy grit is a huge plus, special mention needs to be made of Ben Mendelsohn. After bringing such a depth of feeling to his work with Boden and Fleck in Mississippi Grind, the actor is riveting and malevolently humorous here as a corrupt cop that makes most other corrupt movie cops look like amateurs.
Freaky Tales is a genre-defying riot. Come for the crazy mix tape of circuitously connected plotlines, stay for the joyous explosion of vintage breakdancing on the end credits.
“I’m just so grateful on what I got to infuse in the franchise, and that’s something I’ll be proud of forever,” Melissa Barrera told Deadline at Sundance tonight, indicating no bad blood after being severed from the Screamseries by Spyglass Media last month.
Barrera has clearly moved on, and she has a new horror movie here in Park City in the Midnight section, Your Monster from Caroline Lindy. In the pic, Barrera plays a soft-spoken actress, who finds her voice again after she meets a terrifying, yet weirdly charming Monster living in her closet.
Spyglass dropped Barrera from Scream VII after she reignited the franchise with Jenna Ortega in Scream V and Scream VI (the latter the highest grossing stateside in the horror series at $108M) due to remarks on social media about the Israel-Hamas conflict. The actress days after the firing broke her silence on the studio’s maneuver saying, “I will continue to speak out for those that need it most and continue to advocate for peace and safety, for human rights and freedom…Silence is not an option for me.” Deadline told you that Ortega wound up departing the series due to Wednesday scheduling conflicts; in addition the seventhquel’s new director Christopher Landon who called the short pre-production experience on social “a dream that turned into a nightmare.”
Last weekend at the MPTF’s 17th Annual Evening Before Gala, Barrera, Ortega and a slew of actors from the last two Scream movies reunited for a photo that was posted on Instagram. The photo included Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Liana Liberato, Tony Revolori, Jack Quaid and Barrera’s on-screen father and OG Ghostface Skeet Ulrich.
Deadline asked Barrera tonight how it felt to be back with the old gang.
She told us, “We’re family for life.”
“If we’re ever in the vicinity of each other, we always find each other and that’s what happened at that event,” she continued.
“When we find each other, we just want to spend the night with each other, and nothing is ever going to change that.”
The raucous Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Freaky Tales” included one somber moment as the cast of the ode to all things Oakland paused to acknowledge their late co-star Angus Cloud.
“Rest In Peace to Angus,” Jay Ellis, who plays basketball star Sleepy Floyd in the film, said. “He gave such a great performance.”
Cloud, best known for his work as Fezco, a drug dealer with a heart of gold, in HBO’s “Euphoria,” died in 2023 of an accidental drug overdose. He was 25. “Freaky Tales” is one of Cloud’s final films; he plays a burglar in a smaller supporting role. Ellis noted that Cloud “was there to have so much fun” during shooting of the film’s climactic action sequence — a blood-drenched finale that can’t be spoiled here.
“Freaky Tales” is set in the Bay Area in 1987 over the course of a single day. In the movie the lives of a depressed hitman, a group of punk rock fans, a pair of aspiring hip-hop artists and an NBA phenom collide in unexpected ways.
There’s also a buzzy cameo from an Oscar-winning actor with Oakland ties.
“Freak Tales” was directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the team behind “Half Nelson,” “Mississippi Grind” and “Captain Marvel.” The film is one of several looking for distribution and the audience at Sundance was filled with executives from Netflix, Sony Pictures Classics and Neon.
Fleck said that the movie was loosely inspired by his childhood in Oakland and some of the local legends he observed such as Floyd and rapper Too $hort. “This is sort of my 12 year old fantasy of a movie,” he told the packed house at Sundance’s Eccles Theater on Thursday night.
“No one else was going to make this movie,” he added. “I just had to make it to see it…and of course I dragged Anna along with me for the journey.”
In addition to Ellis and Cloud, the cast of “Freaky Tales” includes Pedro Pascal, Normani Kordei Hamilton, Dominique Thorne and Ben Mendelsohn. “Freaky Tales” is dedicated to Cloud’s memory, a tribute that came during the film’s end credits.
Sundance’s opening day has featured several buzzy premieres, including the debuts of the documentaries “Girls State” and “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story,” as well as “Veni Vidi Vici,” a scabrous look at the ultra-wealthy.
The schedule for the milestone 40th Sundance Film Festival continues to fall into focus. The beloved Utah event — scheduled for Jan. 19-26 in Park City — has unveiled the lineup for Beyond Film programming and revealed that the documentary The Greatest Night in Pop, a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the iconic song “We Are the World,” will be part of this year’s program.
The roster of Beyond Film speakers includes notables with films in this year’s festival like Steven Soderbergh (Presence), Jesse Eisenberg (A Real Pain), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Rob Peace), Sue Bird (Sue Bird: In The Clutch), Dee Rees (Pariah), Lucy Lawless (Never Look Away), André Holland (Exhibiting Forgiveness), Debra Granik (Conbody vs Everybody), Jay Ellis (Freaky Tales) and Nzingha Stewart (Me/We).
The slate also includes a conversation within New Frontier, which champions artists practicing at the crossroads of film, art, performance and new media. Titled “New Frontier: Let’s Rebrand Artificial Intelligence!,” the chat has booked Rashaad Newsome and New Frontier alumni like Navid Khonsari, Ari Melenciano and Sandra Rodriguez.
Another highlight is the return of Sundance alumni like Miguel Arteta (Beatriz at Dinner), Richard Linklater (Hit Man), Dawn Porter (Luther: Never Too Much) Christine Vachon (A Different Man), all of whom will participate in “Power of Story: Four Decades of Taking Chances,” a conversation about their careers in independent film, the legacy of storytelling and the importance of taking risks.
Director Bao Nguyen will unveil Greatest Night in Pop about the seminal 1985 track that features 46 icons including Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper, Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder. Following the screening, there will be an extended conversation with Nguyen, producer Julia Nottingham and producer and star Lionel Richie.
In addition to Power of Story, Cinema Café presented by Audible and The Big Conversation, the lineup includes a New Frontier conversation about artificial intelligence and a roster of events to celebrate the 40th edition. With the exception of Power of Story, all Beyond Film events are free and open to the public.
“We’re thrilled to be adding to our program a special screening of The Greatest Night in Pop, taking us behind the scenes of how ‘We Are the World’ came together, followed by a conversation with Lionel Richie, filmmaker Bao Nguyen and producer Julia Nottingham,” offered Kim Yutani, Sundance Film Festival director of programming. “Our robust film lineup will be rounded out by a wide range of conversations touching upon themes in the programming and featuring some of today’s most inspiring creators and leaders.”
Ania Trzebiatowska, Beyond Film program curator, added: “Especially this year, as we celebrate our 40th edition, these events enable audiences to go beyond the screens — whether you’re watching in theaters here in person, or online from home — to meaningfully connect with artists and their stories.”
The full lineup and detailed information about the program can be found here.
NEW YORK — Theatergoers in select cities will soon be able to watch “20 Days in Mariupol,” the visceral documentary on Russia’s early assault on the Ukrainian city.
The 94-minute film is a joint production by The Associated Press and PBS “Frontline” and has been met with critical acclaim and an audience award at the Sundance Film Festival. AP journalist Mstyslav Chernov directed the movie from 30 hours of footage he and other AP journalists shot in Mariupol in the opening days of the war.
Chernov and AP colleagues Evgeniy Maloletka, a photographer, and producer Vasilisa Stepanenko were the last international journalists in the city before escaping.
“I thought I should do something more. I should do something more with that 30 hours of footage to tell a bigger story and more context to show the audience of the scale,” Chernov has said.
As the film begins its theatrical rollout, here are details on how it came together and where you can watch it.
WHERE CAN I WATCH ‘20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL’?
Theaters in New York and Chicago will host screenings beginning Friday. Showtimes and ticket info can be found at https://20daysinmariupol.com/.
Next week the film will have showings in Chicago, Boston, Santa Monica, California, and the Bay Area. It will play in Sarasota, Florida, on July 28.
The documentary will air later this year on PBS’ “Frontline.”
WHAT SHOULD I KNOW ABOUT THE FILM?
It is an intense account of the war’s early days in Mariupol. Death abounds. Chernov, Maloletka and Stepanenko documented fighting in the streets, the crushing strain on Mariupol’s besieged residents and attacks that left pregnant women, children and others dead.
The film’s trailer provides some sense of difficult scenes in the film.
WHAT ARE CRITICS SAYING ABOUT ‘20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL’?
The film has gotten excellent critical reception. It currently has a 100% rating on the film rating website Rotten Tomatoes.
Harper’s Bazaar said, “Watching Chernov’s film is a humanitarian duty.”
“What comes through most vividly, other than the human tragedy on display, is the vital importance of war correspondents and the courage and ingenuity they must possess in order to work under such life-threatening conditions,” The Hollywood Reporter said in its review.
HOW DID THE FILM COME TOGETHER?
Chernov and the AP team could only send limited footage and dispatches during their 20 days in Mariupol.
Once they were safely outside the city, the team was able to review their footage and Chernov considered what to do with it. He wanted to focus on the time the team was in the city and narrated the film himself.
“It’s OK to tell the audiences about your emotions,” he said. “It’s just important to not let those emotions dictate what you show and don’t show. … While narrated by me, I still tried to keep it fair.”
WHERE CAN I LEARN MORE ABOUT THE REPORTING BEHIND THE FILM?
Chernov’s first-person account of fleeing the city — with Russian soldiers hunting for the AP team — tells the amazing backstory behind their reporting.
For months after leaving Mariupol, the AP team continued to document the conflict in Mariupol, including a detailed investigation into a Russian attack on a theater that killed an estimated 600 civilians and Russia’s efforts to scrub the city’s identity after taking control of it.
The team’s work won the Pulitzer Prize for public service. The Pulitzer site includes links to the team’s stories and videos. AP’s coverage of the war, in Mariupol and beyond, won the breaking news photography category this year.
AP and “Frontline” also produced a project on possible war crimes that can be found on PBS’ site.
Daily news updates on the war are available for free on APNews at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.
Atlanta Police arrested a 17-year-old on Thursday in connection with the murder of Black transgender woman Rasheed Williams, who was featured in the Sundance Film Festival documentary “Kokomo City” in January 2023.
Williams, 35, who performed under the stage name Koko Da Doll, was found shot to death in southwest Atlanta on April 18, according to police. She “was not alert, conscious or breathing, and pronounced deceased on scene,” a statement from the Atlanta Police Department read.
Atlanta Police said homicide detectives were able to secure arrest warrants for murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm against 17-year-old Jermarcus Jernigan, who is being charged as an adult under Georgia law.
“On April 26, 2023, Mr. Jernigan turned himself in at the Zone 1 Precinct,” a separate police statement said. The statement confirmed that Jernigan was transported to the Fulton County Jail and placed into custody without incident.
While the police statement did not identify Williams, “Kokomo City” director D. Smith wrote on Instagram that the victim was Williams.
“On Tuesday night, Rasheeda Williams was shot and killed in Atlanta. Rasheeda, aka Koko Da Doll, was the latest victim of violence against Black transgender women,” Smith wrote on Instagram. “I created Kokomo City because I wanted to show the fun, humanized, natural side of Black trans women. I wanted to create images that didn’t show the trauma or the statistics of murder of Transgender lives.”
The Atlanta Police Department noted in its statement that it was “actively investigating three violent crimes involving transgender women this year.”
It added, “While these individual incidents are unrelated, we are very aware of the epidemic-level violence black and brown transgender women face in America.”
The department told CBS News that it was not able to release further information about the incident at this time.
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Not every film festival can boast such a wide variety of talent and narratives as Sundance. This year was no exception. The event’s eagerly awaited return to in-person screenings and conversations after a three-year break marked a host of provocative, thoughtful, original and beautifully specific movies that closely mirror the world in which we live.
Some of the best offerings at the festival included a movie about an aging Spanish grandmother who discovers the power of self-pleasure and another about two heartbroken lovers in South London who find each other.
There are also compelling documentaries that invite new conversations about Hollywood’s most revered stars and a vibrant dramedy about an Afghan translator making a new life for herself in the U.S.
We dig into those, and more, here in our best-of-the-fest roundup.
Judy Blume gets a touching, nuanced tribute in “Judy Blume Forever.”
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
‘Judy Blume Forever’
You’re not expecting this documentary detailing the storied life and impact of beloved YA novelist Judy Blume to touch you the way it does, to the point you’re on the verge of tears. But using her incredible story, directors Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok tap into our universal yearnings for connection and visibility that, as we realize while watching this, have never quite dissipated since childhood. — Candice Frederick
Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich try to one-up each other in writer-director Chloe Domont’s devilishly coy “Fair Play”
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
‘Fair Play’
Goodness knows we’ve seen enough films that tackle gender politics in a very sexy way (“Unfaithful” and “Disclosure” both come to mind). But writer-director Chloe Domont’s “Fair Play” has the distinction of being both slick and thorny at the same time — and utterly arresting. It’s an increasingly depraved, sensuous treat to watch Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich as the secretly betrothed pair whose formerly arousing relationship hits the skids (to say the least) when she earns what he considers his promotion at the same company. — Candice Frederick
“Little Richard: I Am Everything” brilliantly contextualizes the complicated life and career of the architect of rock ‘n’ roll.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
‘Little Richard: I Am Everything’
It’s hard to resist saying something along the lines of “you think you know, but you have no idea” when reflecting on director Lisa Cortés’ stirring documentary that explores the complicated life and career of Little Richard. But this is one of those instances where a film thoughtfully reexamines previously established truths about a musician’s legacy so fervently that it completely upends you. — Candice Frederick
Brooke Shields braces herself for another cringey interview in an archival scene from the poignant “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.”
Courtesy of Sundance Institute | Photo by Getty
‘Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields’
What’s so special about what director Lana Wilson does in this vivid portrait of the titular actress is that she destabilizes Shields’ own account of her early life and stardom, seemingly in real time, and challenges the audience to do the same. Come for the candid and increasingly shifting reflections on what it was like to be an ogled preteen and teen beauty. Stay for the ultimately affirming story of a woman who took back her life. — Candice Frederick
Marin Ireland and Judy Reyes ground the increasingly disturbing pitch-dark drama “Birth/Rebirth.”
‘Birth/Rebirth’
Director Laura Moss’ pitch-dark drama takes a minute to get where it’s going, initially leading its audience to believe they’re about to watch a horror movie about a killer child corpse. As fun as that concept always is, Moss and co-writer Brendan J. O’Brien have something else in store here. This is the story of a nurse (Judy Reyes) and a morgue technician (Marin Ireland) whose relationships to motherhood end up decaying their moral compasses. And it’s just business as usual. Truly haunting stuff. — Candice Frederick
“The Persian Version” is a a funny, soulful journey across language and time that illuminates the connection between mother and daughter.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute | Photo by Andre Jaeger
‘The Persian Version’
Some people might need a lot of patience to sit through a story that jumps back and forth in time and flits between perspectives, but writer-director Maryam Keshavarz’s “The Persian Version” is so spirited and heartfelt that it hooks you almost immediately. A rebellious young mother (Layla Mohammadi) gets knocked up, breaks the fourth wall (because she’s in the throes of a quarter-life crisis and needs someone to talk to) and begins to confront her strained relationship with her traditional Iranian mother (Niousha Noor) — and soon, with herself. It’s a funny, soulful journey across language and time that also offers an illuminating look at the complexities of motherhood and identity. — Candice Frederick
“Mamacruz” is the geriatric sexual awakening on screen that we’ve long desired.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
‘Mamacruz’
You know a film’s a winner when its mere images are so striking that you might worry dialogue could only ruin it: an aging grandmother (Kiti Mánver) joins a healthy vagina club, paints red lipstick on the Virgin Mary and encourages her husband (Pepe Quero) to finger her. Truly, God bless director Patricia Ortega and co-writer José Ortuño for giving us the geriatric sexual awakening on screen that we’ve long desired. The film’s narrative, by the way, is sensuous and heartrending. A simple yet masterful feat all around. — Candice Frederick
“Fremont” is a clever and whimsical slice-of-life dramedy about an Afghan translator who has come to the U.S.
‘Fremont’
Premiering in the NEXT section of the festival, which highlights bold entries from innovative filmmakers, “Fremont” is a clever and whimsical slice-of-life dramedy about Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), an Afghan translator who has come to the U.S. on a special immigrant visa. Refreshingly, the film is not about her past traumas or crises, but about her daily journey acclimating to a new job, trying to make new friends and other everyday matters. She has found herself in the Bay Area, working at a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Along the way, she tries to find joy and creativity in all things, like when she gets promoted to writing the fortunes that go into the cookies. With a great debut performance from Zada (a real-life Afghan refugee) at its center, it’s full of heart and wit. There’s also an appearance by “The Bear” star Jeremy Allen White that made me cackle — but that’s all I’ll say, in order to not spoil it! — Marina Fang
Director Erica Tremblay has made such an assured feature directorial debut with “Fancy Dance.”
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
‘Fancy Dance’
As Candice wrote in a feature about several Sundance titles that put a much-needed spotlight on the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, “Fancy Dance” tackles the issue with such care and deftness. That’s thanks to “Reservation Dogs” writer and director Erica Tremblay, who has made such an assured feature directorial debut with this film, co-written with Miciana Alise. It’s anchored by a wonderful lead performance by the always-great Lily Gladstone (who has deserved far more lead roles like this in her career). Once the dust has settled on Sundance, I truly hope this film gets a big spotlight throughout the rest of the year. — Marina Fang
“You Hurt My Feelings” is all about the things that, perhaps, we should say to the people in our lives — but don’t, out of personal or professional courtesy.
‘You Hurt My Feelings’
Writer-director Nicole Holofcener has made a career out of wry and observant comedies about human foibles, and she once again has delivered. “You Hurt My Feelings” is all about the things that, perhaps, we should say to the people in our lives — but don’t, out of personal or professional courtesy. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Beth, a writer who learns that her typically supportive husband Don (“The Crown” star Tobias Menzies) actually doesn’t like her latest book but is afraid to tell her. Holofcener explores it with the rest of the film’s characters too: Don, a therapist who’s starting to sense he’s not really helping his frustrating clients; Beth’s sister, Sara (Michaela Watkins), an interior designer trying to meet her clients’ particular requests; and Beth’s husband, Mark, a struggling actor (played with typical aplomb by Arian Moayed). — Marina Fang
Nida Manzoor’s directorial debut, “Polite Society,” is so bold and inventive, and absolutely rules.
‘Polite Society’
When I realized “Polite Society” was the feature directorial debut from “We Are Lady Parts” creator Nida Manzoor, it all made so much sense. Like her Peacock comedy series, this movie is so bold and inventive, and absolutely rules. Protagonist Ria (Priya Kansara) is a British Pakistani teen aspiring to be a stuntwoman. When her parents try to marry off her older sister Lena (Ritu Arya) to — as Ria describes him, “a rich Mr. Darcy wanker”— Ria and her friends stage a heist, trying to dig up dirt on him and stop the wedding. It’s such a fun mix of everything from action to coming-of-age to modern-day Jane Austen, and I would happily watch it again. Thankfully, it’ll be released in theaters on April 28. — Marina Fang
“Rye Lane” hits all the languid rhythms of great walking-and-talking movies like the “Before…” trilogy.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
‘Rye Lane’
I was swooning the entire way through “Rye Lane” because it hits all the languid rhythms of great walking-and-talking movies like the “Before…” trilogy. Unlike a lot of movies in that genre, it centers two Black British 20-somethings in South London, talking about everything from their budding careers to past heartbreaks. There’s so much to love about the film, a great debut feature from Raine Allen-Miller that features two winning performances from Vivian Oparah and “Industry” star David Jonsson (it’s nice to see him in a way less stressful role). It’s also 82 minutes long — who doesn’t love an efficient movie! Also, great news: You won’t have to wait long to see it because it will be available on Hulu on March 31. — Marina Fang
“A Thousand and One,” a drama about an impoverished single mother and her son in New York City, won the Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize in the U.S. dramatic competition, while “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project” was awarded the top prize in the U.S. documentary category. This year’s winners were announced at an awards ceremony Friday afternoon in Park City, Utah, which included an audience prize for the documentary “ 20 Days in Mariupol.”
Writer Jeremy O. Harris, filmmaker Eliza Hittman and actor Marlee Matlin judged the U.S. dramatic competition.
Harris, through tears, said he asked to give the grand jury prize to “A Thousand and One” and writer-director A.V. Rockwell himself.
“Never have I seen a life so similar to my own rendered with such nuance and tenderness” Harris said. “This film reached into my gut and pulled from it every emotion I’ve learned to mask in these spaces.”
Rockwell, who made her feature debut with the film, was similarly emotional.
“This has been such a long journey for me but the institute has been such a beautiful support system,” Rockwell said.
“20 Days in Mariupol,” a first-person account of the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, won the audience prize for world cinema documentary. A joint project between The Associated Press and PBS “Frontline,” the film utilizes 30 hours of footage AP journalist Mstyslav Chernov and his colleagues shot in the besieged Ukrainian city before they were extracted.
“I want to thank everyone who believed in us: AP, Frontline and Sundance and all the audiences who did not turn away,” Chernov said. “This is not an achievement, this is a privilege.”
Sing J. Lee won the directing award in U.S. dramatic for “The Accidental Getaway Driver.” The team from “ Theater Camp ” was recognized with a special jury prize for ensemble. Lío Mehiel, who goes by they/them pronouns, received the special jury award for their performance in “Mutt,” about a trans-masculine person one day in New York. And the drama “Magazine Dreams,” in which Jonathan Majors plays an amateur bodybuilder, was recognized for creative vision.
“Everyone in this room, everyone, every person, we give you our deepest props and our deepest respect,” Matlin said through an interpreter. She also gave a shout-out to her “CODA” team, who won big at the festival two years ago. Her Oscar winning co-star Troy Kotsur was in the audience cheering her on.
Other grand jury prizes winners were: “Scrapper,” in world cinema, about a 12-year-old girl living alone on the outskirts of London after her mother’s death; and “The Eternal Memory,” in world cinema documentary, about the effects of Alzheimer’s on a relationship of 25 years. “Kokomo City,” about the lives of Black, trans sex workers, won the NEXT innovator award and the audience award in the NEXT category.
Other audience award winners included “The Persian Version,” for U.S. Dramatic, “Beyond Utopia,” for U.S. Documentary and “Shayda” for World Cinema Dramatic. The “festival favorite” award went to “Radical,” starring Eugenio Derbez as an inspirational teacher in a Mexican border town.
In total, 12 films premiered in the world cinema documentary section, including films about climate change, Syria, growing up during apartheid and the International Chopin Piano Competition. “The Eternal Memory,” about a couple dealing with Alzheimer’s, won the category’s grand jury prize.
Other prize winners in the category included “Fantastic Machine,” for creative vision, “Against the Tide” for verité filmmaker, and “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood” for directing.
Several Sundance winners from last year were recently nominated for Oscars, including documentaries “Navalny” and “All That Breathes.”
Many Sundance films came to the festival with distribution in place. Apple TV+ debuted “Still: A Michael J. Fox Story” and “Stephen Curry: Underrated.” Neon had “Infinity Pool,” A24 brought six films including “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” “You Hurt My Feelings,” “Past Lives.” Searchlight had the South London rom com “Rye Lane.”
There were also several big acquisitions made at the festival this year. Apple TV+, who got its first best picture win when it paid $25 million for “CODA” out of Sundance, scooped up John Carney’s (“Once”) musical rom com “Flora and Son,” with Eve Hewson and Joseph Gordon Levitt. Netflix secured the rights to the corporate thriller “Fair Play,” with Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor, made and sold by MRC. Both films went for a reported $20 million. Searchlight also bought Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s mockumentary “Theater Camp” for a theatrical release later this year.
This year’s festival, the first in-person gathering since 2020, debuted 111 feature films and 64 short films. Over 75% of the films are available on Sundance’s online platform through Sunday, January 29.
“We’re already thinking about the next one,” Sundance CEO Joana Vicente said.
When it comes to performances Hollywood considers prestige, sometimes enough to earn the actor an Oscar, there are a few familiar stereotypes: an enslaved person, a nondescript “wife,” a criminal, a white savior. But less often discussed is the reverence actors are shown for playing sex workers.
Think Eartha Kitt in “Anna Lucasta,” Halle Berry in “Jungle Fever,” Ziyi Zhang in “Memoirs of a Geisha,” Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman,” Jodie Foster in “Taxi Driver,” Jon Voight in “Midnight Cowboy” and River Phoenix in “My Own Private Idaho.”
A dizzying montage of clips from these performances in the 2021 documentary “Celluloid Bordello” underscores those accolades. In the film, streaming on Prime Video this month, director Juliana Piccillo points to the fetishization, victimization and exploitative stereotypes that too often pop up in these screen narratives.
Even more importantly, she does this by turning her camera on actual sex workers, many of whom are queer, as they discuss the ways their work and likenesses have been depicted in Hollywood. And though many of these performances do indeed have merit, including Jane Fonda’s in “Klute,” “Celluloid Bordello” makes you think about what exactly makes these roles work.
Actors Sammy Davis Jr. and Eartha Kitt in a scene from the movie “Anna Lucasta” which was released in 1958.
Donaldson Collection via Getty Images
While there are certainly portrayals that depict agency or are more realistic — like Dolly Parton in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” and Mya Taylor in “Tangerine” — far too often the characters are killed, drug-addicted or a straight-up fantasy.
That pattern is even further complicated when you consider portrayals of queer sex workers and those of color. There’s often an immediate understanding that something traumatic has brought them to this work, that they are only doing it until they are rescued by a man, or that they generally lack morality of their own.
Rarely do they consider the sex workers who do it because they want to, and are good at it.
Each of the real-life sex workers, as well as sexuality and gender educators, interviewed in “Celluloid Bordello” says a version of this, giving credence to voices that are so often left out of the conversation when we talk about the way they show up on screen.
This reinstatement of sex workers in their own narratives is pushed even further in “The Stroll” and “Kokomo City,” two new films premiering at the Sundance Film Festival this year.
Kristen Lovell, co-director of “The Stroll”
Courtesy of Sundance Institute | Photo by Sara Falco
Within the first few minutes of “The Stroll,” co-director and star Kristen Lovell, a Black, trans former sex worker, makes her intent clear: She was once interviewed for a documentary that ran off with a condensed, edited version of her story, and she was not pleased. “The Stroll,” her directorial debut with trans filmmaker Zackary Drucker, is her chance to course-correct.
That’s the perfect setup to tell a story that has long been unshared, or at least not shared in a way that accurately represented the people inside it, apparently. Though to be clear, there’s a very grassroots style of filmmaking instantly discernible in “The Stroll.” Like “Celluloid Bordello,” it’s not a movie with a whole lot of artistic merit. But narratively speaking, it’s an eye-opener.
“The Stroll” tells the story of its eponymous strip in the meatpacking district of New York City, which now charms a slew of white, upper-crust socialites and their families but was once the office for many Black, trans sex workers in the ’90s.
Two transgender sex workers stop to relax momentarily while strolling through the meatpacking district in New York City in June 1999.
Lynsey Addario via Getty Images
Like many queer Black folks at the time, and still today, Lovell was fired from her job once she began transitioning. Facing rampant discrimination in the job market, she turned to sex work to make a living. It wasn’t long before she came upon the Stroll, then an all but neglected area of the city where sex workers could find work and had formed a community of their own.
“The Stroll” tells the story of this area and the lives that frequented it. It’s a commemoration of what once was and what will never be again — and asks at what cost.
Lovell personally interviews sex workers who, like she does throughout the film, share what it was like to work there. While many Black trans people found friendship and community in the early years, they were also met with increased policing, brutality and insistent calls to remove them from the space, first from angry neighbors and then from Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
The politician was hellbent on “cleaning up” New York City, which in part meant displacing the many Black, trans sex workers who thrived in the meatpacking district. “The Stroll” details their painful removal and the violence against them.
A group of sex workers, including Sugarbear and Charisse, both on the left, walk through the meatpacking district in New York City in September 1999.
Lynsey Addario via Getty Images
While Lovell and Drucker show compassion for the sex workers they interview, who talk about needing to be a “superhero” for daily survival and even arming themselves if necessary, the directors balance the story with the voices of former meatpackers and longtime residents. They also include an interview with a photographer who documented the area at the time.
This creates a fuller story around the complexity of the Stroll’s demise, while showing some texture in the filmmaking. “The Stroll” is largely a reclamation of the voices that came before, as well as a historical document of New York — in particular, the long and persistent fight for queer rights throughout the city and beyond.
The documentary does a lot, sometimes losing its focus, but it’s hard not to find its ending bittersweet when you consider all the lives that were lost, the battles that were won, and the sight of a warm embrace between sex workers who have remained friends all this time.
There’s a different, wholly affirmed narrative among sex workers pulsing through “Kokomo City,” directed by D. Smith, the Grammy-winning writer and producer of hits like Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” album. The filmmaker makes a strong debut with a documentary as disarming as its black-and-white cinematography.
Dominique Silver is one of several Black, transgender sex workers interviewed in “Kokomo City.”
And it’s as simple a premise as four Black, transgender, female sex workers in New York and Georgia just talking about themselves and the world around them, both inside and beyond the Black community, honestly, confidently and at times downright hilariously.
Unlike Lovell and Drucker’s mostly talking-heads approach in “The Stroll,” Smith meets her subjects exactly where they are. Like in a bathtub, covered in bubbles with a bonnet on her head, or sprawled out on her bed just shooting the breeze, or adjusting her half-top in the mirror before a night out.
It puts each one in a place where they can really get into the ins-and-outs of who they really are, while directly confronting who you think they are. That means diving into their experiences at the intersection of being Black, trans and sex workers. No, they’re not trying to take your man, as one says. They don’t even want your man. It’s a business transaction.
One describes her volatile relationship with her brother and another talks about her family virtually kicking her out of the house. But that space of trauma and tragedy isn’t where “Kokomo City” sits. Rather, Smith seems more interested in what troubles them today as they conduct their work and find healthy romantic relationships along the way.
Daniella Carter speaks her truth in a scene from “Kokomo City.”
For instance, there’s the way they feel forced to confront disdain from within the Black community, particularly from some Black women who ostracize them and accuse them of taking their men.
In the bathtub scene with Daniella Carter, which seems to stretch for about 20 minutes, she drops truth bombs about gender, sexual agency and the cognitive dissonance of wanting a man who finds more pleasure from another woman, whom he pays, and blaming her for it.
Another striking moment in the film finds two sex workers sitting at a table, one with dark-brown skin and the other with light skin, talking about how they are perceived differently in the world. They speak openly about colorism, how trans identity is viewed, and how others too often tether it to sexuality.
“Kokomo City” is one of those freewheeling, provocative conversations that you don’t often see in film today in a society so governed by ever-shifting rules around what can and cannot be said aloud, especially when it pertains to the Black community. Smith abandons all of that pretense.
Romantic couple Rich-Paris and XoTommy in a scene from “Kokomo City.”
Surprisingly, she had no plans to even direct the film. But after five other directors turned it down, she took it on as her own. And it proved worthwhile, showing a lot of promise for a first-time filmmaker with one goal: honesty.
“I wanted to feel something untampered with,” she writes in the press notes for “Kokomo City.” “Something that looks like my actual experience. Something that we can all find ourselves in. Something without all the rules and laws that separate us as people of color. I wanted those walls down.”
While “Kokomo City” might not break through some of those walls, it might at least spark conversations that should have already been going on. And with that, hopefully, comes a step toward authenticity around sex workers on the big screen.
PARK CITY, Utah — Marlee Matlin, Jeremy O. Harris and Eliza Hittman exited the premiere of a film playing in competition at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday night after the closed captioning device failed to work.
Matlin, who is deaf, is serving on the jury alongside Harris and Hittman for films debuting in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the festival in Park City, Utah, this week. The jurors walked out collectively when they realized the situation, which happened during the premiere of “Magazine Dreams.” Variety first reported the news.
Joana Vicente, the CEO of the Sundance Institute, said in a statement to The Associated Press on Saturday that the closed captioning device, which relies on Wi-Fi, had been checked before the screening and was working, but malfunctioned nonetheless.
“Our team immediately worked with the devices in that venue to test them again for the next screening and the device worked without any malfunction,” Vicente said. “Our goal is to make all experiences (in person and online) as accessible as possible for all participants. Our accessibility efforts are, admittedly, always evolving and feedback helps drive it forward for the community as a whole.”
Accessibility at film festivals has been a major topic for years, and the incident once again spotlighted how organizers are trying to make changes to accommodate all fans. Vicente said her team has been working hard in that area, but acknowledged there is more to be learned.
“We are committed to improving experiences & belonging for all festival attendees,” the statement read. “We consider accessibility as one of the primary drivers of institutional excellence and this work is done in partnership with film teams.”
Matlin did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Vicente said she and her fellow jurors would see “Magazine Dreams” in the coming days.
PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — A new documentary looks into the sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and raises questions about the depth of the FBI investigation in 2018.
“Justice,” from filmmaker Doug Liman, debuted Friday night at the Sundance Film Festival to a sold-out theater surrounded by armed guards.
The film, made under intense secrecy, focuses on allegations made by Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez that were detailed in a New Yorker article in 2018. Ramirez alleged that at a gathering with friends when she was a freshman in 1983, Kavanaugh pulled down his pants and thrust his penis at her. Kavanaugh has denied those claims. “Justice” also plays a taped recording of a tip given to the FBI from another Yale classmate, Max Stier, that describes a similar incident that the FBI never investigated.
The Stier report was previously detailed in 2019 by New York Times reporters Robin Pogebrin and Kate Kelly as part of their book “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation.” But the details of it came under scrutiny. After the story was posted online but before it was in the print edition, the Times revised the story to add that the book reported that the woman supposedly involved in the incident declined to be interviewed, and that her friends say she doesn’t recall the incident.
Stier was not directly interviewed for the film and declined the filmmakers’ request to comment on the contents. An unnamed person whose voice was manipulated for anonymity provided the Stier tape to the filmmakers.
Kavanaugh was sworn in as the 114th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in October of 2018 after a narrow 50-48 roll call following a wrenching debate over sexual misconduct. He strenuously denied the allegations of Christine Blasey Ford, who says he sexually assaulted her when they were teens.
Many people referenced in the film, from Kavanaugh himself to several of Ramirez’s friends who were allegedly there, similarly declined to speak or never responded.
“Justice” is especially critical of the FBI investigation that took place after the hearings. Through FOIA requests the filmmakers found that there were some 4,500 tips sent to the tipline that went uninvestigated.
One of Ramirez’s friends from Yale who was interviewed for the film provided text messages in which a mutual friend admits to being contacted by “Kavanaugh’s people” and participated in the narrative that Ramirez didn’t remember things correctly.
Blasey Ford appears in new footage only in the first several moments of “Justice,” asking Liman, a filmmaker known for “Swingers” and “The Bourne Identity,” why he’s making this film — a question that he doesn’t quite answer.
In a Q&A after the film, Liman said he was simply outraged after watching her testimony in 2018. The making of the film, which they self-financed, was shrouded in secrecy. Everyone signed nondisclosure agreements, Liman said, and they even had code names for those who agreed to participate. He said that people are “terrified” and that those who came forward are “heroes.”
Most of the focus is on telling Ramirez’s story — where she came from, how she ended up at Yale and what kind of person she is and was. Several academics specializing in trauma, as well as lawyers, help explain why memory of traumatic events is reliably fractured and how those gaps can be weaponized by prosecutors.
“Justice’s” surprise inclusion in the festival was announced on Thursday, the first day of the festival, but it quickly became one of the most anticipated films in a slate of over 100. At least part of the reason for something like “Justice” to debut at Sundance is to drum up buzz and secure a distributor. As many of the lawyers in the film say, the stakes are whether or not Kavanaugh perjured himself under oath.
Asked what he wants to happen when audiences see “Justice,” Liman said, “I kind of feel like the job ends with the film and what happens afterwards in beyond my control.”
Standing beside him, his producer Amy Hardy said she disagreed. Hardy said she hopes it triggers outrage and leads to “a real investigation with subpoena powers.”
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Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.
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Where does Brandon Cronenberg‘s Infinity Pool take place? Yes, the marketing materials say it’s an “isolated island resort,” and that’s certainly the case, but where more generally is a question that hovers over the thriller debuting at the Sundance Film Festival. The action happens in a country that doesn’t exist called Li Tolga in a world that’s not exactly our own. The effect is certainly disconcerting—and it’s intended as such—but as the plot goes on you start to wonder if it isn’t just hollow artifice.
Infinity Pool, which will hit theaters on January 27, starts off as a parable that is incredibly on trend these days: A beautiful, wealthy couple grapples with their insecurities in a stunning locale. But then, true to form for any member of the Cronenberg family, it swerves into something more intangibly horrifying. The nightmare that unfolds is certainly effective. At the same time, there’s an emptiness at the movie’s core.
Alexander Skarsgård, a willing participant in the experiments of boundary-pushing directors, is James Foster, an author whose last book was a flop. He is on a vacation with his rich wife Em, played by Cleopatra Coleman. Their relationship is chilly. He’s in a rut; she provides for him as a publishing house heiress. The resort where they are staying is an entire city within this fictional region, which we are told is overrun by crime and an unforgiving justice system. Guests are supposed to stay within the gates of their paradise which includes a nightclub and a Chinese restaurant.
It’s in the confines of this manufactured fun that James and Em encounter the fun-loving Gabi (reigning scream queen Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert), who coax them to sneak out for an afternoon on a secluded beach with a car borrowed from one of the employees. On the way back from their drunken excursion the vehicle hits a local and the foursome is taken into custody. James, being the driver, is held responsible, and he is offered a way to pay for his crimes. For a fee, he will be cloned and then forced to watch his doppelganger, screaming, get executed.
Instead of being horrified, James is turned on, and then the hedonism begins. Suddenly, offered the opportunity to commit atrocities with just financial repercussions—or so he thinks—James is drawn into an underworld of vacationers who use this loophole to their advantage.
Always willing to subvert his Adonis-like looks, Skarsgård is the ideal actor to play a man so filled with self-loathing that he will debase himself for any feeling of power. James’ sudden jolt of testosterone makes Skarsgård puff up, and we watch as he physically shrinks as he realizes he’s in further and further over his head. Hot off her meme-generating performance in Ti West‘s Pearl, Goth once again unleashes a feral, unpredictable energy that makes her thrilling to watch. In one early moment, Gabi demonstrates her skills as an actress, Goth morphing before our eyes into a coquettish, frustrated housewife from an infomercial. Later, she’s screaming her head off on the top of a car. It’s entrancing. The other actors, including Coleman, are given little to do, forced to play either James’ cheerleaders or obstacles.
Cronenberg is adept at merging the gorgeous and disgusting, which eventually coalesces into a hallucinatory orgy scene. But the unsavory qualities of Infinity Pool extend beyond the body horror into areas that feel less intentional and more simply underdeveloped. While Cronenberg is clearly playing with established tropes, the barbaric foreign land is just that, complete with grotesque masks that are part of the culture’s tradition. The white rampaging tourists are, yes, the villains here, but the vagueness of the landscape allows Cronenberg to get away with not having to think too hard about the implications of his story. (I can’t stop thinking about a cutaway shot of men in traditional Hasidic Jewish garb with exaggerated prosthetic noses, that seems to serve no purpose but to provoke.)
After all the madness, Cronenberg hits on an ending that leaves James’ soul precariously hanging in the balance. It’s an evocative image that resonates long after you’ve finished watching, but the more you pick at this fable, the more it starts to come apart.
This film about a Jersey guy brimming with toxic masculinity was Gordon-Levitt’s feature writing and directing debut. He starred as the title character, with Scarlett Johansson as the woman of his dreams, who still can’t match his distorted, X-rated expectations.
“That’s what I always wanted,” he says. “Direct a movie that plays Sundance. It was a life goal. Funny enough, I remember loving the experience of watching the movie, but one of the things I remember most afterwards is talking to my mom about the movie. Don Jon deals heavily with the objectification of women—and men as well—but this is something that my mom always raised my brother and me to be quite focused on. And I made a movie about that, but in a roundabout way. It satirizes it and brings that objectification right into your face.”
“The movie is playing at Sundance, where I wanted it to play, and it played well in front of a big audience, and all that external validation was there. But actually, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of that night is a conversation I had just with my own mom,” he says.
Years would pass before his next big Sundance experience, but that one would involve the story of a mother too.
2023 —Flora and Son
Eve Hewson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Flora and Son.
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Gordon-Levitt’s latest film, Flora and Son, is set to debut on opening weekend of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Eve Hewson stars as a single mom in Dublin whose struggle to earn a living while raising a troubled boy has withered most of her other hopes and dreams. She still clings to music as a passion, and Gordon-Levitt plays her online guitar teacher.
The musical is directed by John Carney, the filmmaker behind the 2007 Sundance musical hit Once. “He strikes a balance between bringing that kind of magic that only a musical can bring, but on the other hand, grounding it in real, human, heartfelt life in a way that I think is pretty unique,” Gordon-Levitt says. “Getting to finally do some music in a movie is momentous for me in a new and different way. Even though it’s kind of a humble musical—that’s more my style.”
Despite his long history at Sundance, Gordon-Levitt says the annual gathering means more to him than just a platform to show off work. He thinks of it as an inspiration, and quotes something he once heard from that guy who gave him his first Sundance T-shirt.
“I would just echo Mr. Redford in trying to direct our focus back to the creative process itself,” Gordon-Levitt says. “Ultimately that’s what the spirit of Sundance is, in my opinion. And the creative process itself is something that people can have—you can have, I can have, anybody can have—whether you get into Sundance or you don’t get into Sundance. It doesn’t have to all be this elite clique of the industry. It can be anybody, everybody.”
After the COVID-19 pandemic forced it go completely virtual for the past two years, the 2023 Sundance Film Festival — one of the leading showcases for independent narrative and documentary films — returned Thursday with in-person screenings to kick off the festival in Park City, Utah.
The showcase, which runs for 11 days, will also make virtual screenings available across the U.S. via Sundance’s digital platform from Jan. 24-30.
The festival includes 110 feature-length films from 28 countries, most of which are world premieres.
General atmosphere of the Egyptian Theatre marquee at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 19, 2023 in Park City, Utah.
Getty Images
There will be documentaries about actors Michael J. Fox and Brooke Shields, NBA star Stephen Curry, author Judy Blume, and rock ‘n’ roll artists Little Richard and the Indigo Girls.
Other documentaries will also cover such topics as the war in Ukraine (“20 Days in Mariupol”), the pandemic (“A Still Small Voice”), refugees from North Korea (“Beyond Utopia”), South African apartheid (“Milisuthando”), the effects of Alzheimer’s (“The Eternal Memory”), sexual assault (“Victim/Suspect”), the hardships facing farmers and restaurants during COVID (“Food and Country”), indigenous and Native American rights (“Twice Colonized,” “Bad Press”), body image issues (“Is There Anybody Out There?”), the societal impact of photography (“Fantastic Machine”), cults (“AUM: The Cult at the End of the World”), film fanaticism (“Kim’s Video”), and protections for transgender sex workers (“The Stroll”).
A last-minute addition to the festival lineup, announced Thursday, is the Doug Liman documentary “Justice,” about the investigation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Narrative films include features starring Jennifer Connelly (“Bad Behaviour”), Emilia Jones (“Cat Person”), Cynthia Erivo (“Drift”), Daisy Ridley (“Sometimes I Think About Dying”), Emilia Clarke (“The Pod Generation”), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (“You Hurt My Feelings”), Will Forte (“Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out”), and Tiffany Haddish (“Landscape With Invisible Hand”). There is also a new feature by “Once” director John Carney (“Flora and Son”).
The Midnight section offers genre films best watched late at night, including the macabre “Talk to Me” and “Sorcery.”
The festival also hosts a series of filmmaker conversations called “Beyond Film,” featuring Barry Jenkins, Dakota Johnson, Randall Park, Ruth Reichl and Marlee Matlin.
Although not all films have been previewed at press time, below are some of the highlights from the first few days of the festival. Additional highlights will be published as Sundance continues.
A scene from the documentary “Little Richard: I Am Everything.”
Bungalow Media + Entertainment/Sundance Film Festival
Richard Wayne Penniman grew up Black and queer in the segregated South. As Little Richard, his musical genius and showmanship would launch him to fame as one of the founding fathers of rock ‘n’ roll. He had a spate of hits in the mid-1950s (including “Tutti Frutti” and “Long Tall Sally”) that also became hits for White artists covering his songs. But before pop music could become more integrated, Richard shifted gears, dropped out of the rock scene, and studied at a seminary to become a preacher and gospel singer. But not for long.
Filled with rich and captivating concert footage spanning decades, Lisa Cortés’ documentary perfectly captures the power of Little Richard on stage, including the fluid sexuality he presented in performance, becoming a trailblazer for such artists as David Bowie and Prince. The numerous interview clips also show his progression from white-hot rock star to gospel artist to elder statesman of American music (with side forays of making controversial statements about homosexuality, both pro and con). Captivating and energizing, like its magnetic subject. [Side note: The film could have done without the excessive pixie dust superimposed onto footage; Little Richard was magical enough!] A co-production of CNN Films and HBO Max. Screens Jan. 19, 20, 21, 27, 28; streams online Jan. 24-30.
For two decades, Kim’s Video was a much loved, guerilla-style video store on Manhattan’s Lower East Side whose stock not only included rare genre movies from around the globe, but also bootlegs of esoteric titles that would be confiscated by authorities (and replenished, with startling regularity). The proprietor, Korean entrepreneur Youngman Kim, eventually succumbed to the death of the video rental store in 2008 by donating his entire stock of 55,000 VHS tapes and DVDs to Salemi, Italy, on the condition that they would use the collection as the basis of a cultural institution, part of the struggling town’s bid to boost tourism. But when documentary filmmaker (and loyal Kim’s customer) David Redmon went to Salemi in search of Kim’s videos, he discovered this cultural treasure moldering away behind (un)locked doors. And so, he hatched a plan. A wonderfully tongue-in-cheek tribute to film fanaticism which examines both European bureaucracy and one bemused businessman’s legacy. Screens Jan. 19, 20, 21, 22, 26; streams online Jan. 24-30.
As mankind looks again to the Moon, and to Mars, for extended periods of human exploration in outer space, NASA tries to prepare for the psychological deprivation of long-haul space expeditions. Dr. Al Holland, a NASA psychologist, has studied astronauts working on the International Space Station to determine the effects of their isolation and long-term separation from family and friends, to gauge how those effects might jeopardize a mission to a planet tens of millions of miles away.
Ido Mizrahy’s documentary examines those difficulties, from the astronauts’ Zoom calls to their kids back home, to the failure of experiments in living in manufactured isolation. The film proves that the human desire for exploration, noble as it is, does not come without huge personal costs. Screens Jan. 19, 20, 21, 24, 27; streams online Jan. 24-30.
A scene from the documentary “20 Days in Mariupol.”
Frontline PBS, Associated Press/Sundance Film Festival
There are a few notable horror films playing at Sundance, but nothing can match the real-life horrors inflicted upon the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in the early days of Russia’s invasion. Associated Press journalists Mstyslav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko were the last remaining Western journalists in Mariupol as it came under bombardment from Russian shells, striking civilian homes and hospitals, and turning the city of nearly half-a-million into rubble. The film recounts the journalists’ efforts (under very real threats to their lives) to capture the devastating impact of the war, medical staff’s herculean attempts to save the wounded (including infants and young children), and the predicament of now-homeless residents seeking shelter from the onslaught. It also traces the reporters’ struggles to get internet or cellphone signals while dodging tanks in order to share their reporting with the world. And it captures the final results: images of medieval-style brutality, death and destruction disseminated by the AP to global media.
As documentarians of one nation’s barbaric assault upon another, the journalists act as clear-eyed witnesses to Putin’s inhumanity, in a warning to the world. Chernov, the narrator, describes what he has recorded with absolutely zero overstatement: “This is painful to watch. But it must be painful to watch.”
Essential viewing, especially for anyone who harbors any doubt about Ukraine’s right to defend its sovereignty. A co-production of Frontline PBS and the Associated Press. Screens Jan. 20, 21, 22, 25, 26; streams online Jan. 24-30.
The overfishing of our oceans is an environmental catastrophe in the making, but it is also a catastrophe in the preservation of traditional ways of life for Koli fisherman along the shores of Mumbai. Rakesh and Ganesh are friends who have taken different trajectories; one fishes the traditional way, on a tiny boat of his own in shallow waters; the other operates a massive industrial boat with a large crew in the deep Indian Ocean, hoping to score a large catch that will help pay his massive expenses. But Chinese fishing boats are depleting the waters off India, increasing Ganesh’s frustrations about his business’s failure.
Director Sarvnik Kaur’s film presents the friends’ struggles — and the increasing tension in their relationship as Ganesh tries to convince his friend to join his ventures — as a microcosm for the technological advances that are plundering the Earth and making livelihoods all the more difficult to achieve, and which tempt Ganesh to employ illegal measures to try to keep his head above water. Jan. 20, 21, 22, 26, 27; streams online Jan. 24-30.
The International Chopin Piano Competition, held every five years in Warsaw, Poland, is one of the supreme showcases for classical musicians in the world, helping to launch unique talents on the global stage. As such, it is a cause for joy, agony, distress, heartbreak and self-induced terror among the young musicians who are competing, some of whom aren’t even adults.
Jakub Piątek’s engrossing fly-on-the-wall documentary covers the most recent competition, held in 2021 (it’d been delayed a year because of COVID), and introduces us to many of the young artists from around the world who came to Warsaw in the hopes of grabbing the brass ring. There is less music than you might expect, as the film focuses more on the disharmony that the competition causes within some of the contestants’ psyches, as they maneuver the logistics of competition rounds and the fragility of their emotions while trying to deliver confident performances to a demanding audience, resulting in a nail-biter of a finale. (One lesson learned: Hair spray may not help.) Screens Jan. 20, 21, 22, 24, 26; streams online Jan. 24-30.
A scene from the documentary “5 Seasons of Revolution.”
The filmmaker behind this eyewitness account of Syrians’ fight against authoritarian President Bashar al-Assad goes by the name of Lina (as well as several other aliases, depending upon her audience). Beginning in the days of the Arab Spring, Lina and her cohort of activist and journalist friends document demonstrations against Syria’s oppressive regime, but soon stop believing that its downfall is imminent, at least not without incalculably large costs. One example of the painful consequences they witness is a shop owner who refuses to open his business out of solidarity with an anti-Assad general strike, and is consequently stuffed into the trunk of a car by security forces. The destruction of the city of Homs, in retaliation for anti-Assad protests, is horrific, especially compared to the relative calm in Damascus, where the regime’s grip was solid.
Shot surreptitiously over several years, “5 Seasons of Revolution” is a vivid testament to the challenges these friends confront as both participants in protests and their documenters. Screens Jan. 21, 22, 23, 25, 27; streams online Jan. 24-30.
A scene from the documentary “The Deepest Breath.”
Extreme sports don’t get more extreme than this: diving, alone and without an auxiliary tank, to depths of 100 meters or more, under pressures that shrink your lungs to half their normal size, and under stresses that could cause blackouts and even death upon your return to the surface. For audiences who may not understand why someone would willingly do this, Laura McGann’s gripping documentary presents its subjects — Italian freediver Alessia Zecchini and Irish freediving instructor Stephen Keenan — whose fascination with the sport, and their drive to set records, led them to each other, and to a fateful training session deep in the “Blue Hole” tunnel off a beach in Dahab, Egypt in 2017. Using a vast archive of creepily-beautiful footage from freediving competitions, and contemporaneous and recent interviews, McGann’s film makes us understand the allure of the sport at the same time that it presents an utterly horrifying picture of how vulnerable a human being can be, alone amid the silent, dark depths. Screens Jan. 21, 22, 24, 28, 29. Not available via streaming. The film will be released later this year on Netflix.
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Randall Park made a pact with himself some years ago that he wouldn’t attend the Sundance Film Festival if he didn’t have a project there. But the “Fresh Off the Boat” star never imagined that his first time would be as a director and not as an actor.
His adaptation of “Shortcomings,” Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel about three young-ish Asian Americans finding themselves in the Bay Area, is among the films debuting in competition at the festival, which begins Thursday night in Park City, Utah.
“Sundance is the pinnacle to me,” Park said in a recent interview. “I still can’t believe we’re going.”
Park is just one of hundreds of filmmakers putting finishing touches on passion projects and making the sojourn to Park City this week, looking to make a splash at the first in-person edition of the storied independent film festival in two years.
Festivalgoers will see some unexpected turns from stars, like Jonathan Majors as an amateur bodybuilder in “Magazine Dreams,” Emilia Clarke as a futuristic parent in “Pod Generation,” Daisy Ridley as a cubicle worker in “Sometimes I Think About Dying” and Anne Hathaway as a glamourous counselor working at a youth prison in 1960s Massachusetts in “Eileen.”
“Bridgerton” star Phoebe Dynevor also breaks out of her corset leading the contemporary adult thriller “Fair Play” as an ambitious woman working at a high stakes hedge fund with a boyfriend played by Alden Ehrenreich. Sundance will be her first film festival ever and she’s especially excited that it’s with one of the best scripts she’s ever read.
“It’s quite a polarizing one,” Dynevor said. “I can’t wait to see how everyone responds to it.”
The slate of over 100 films premiering around the clock (from 8am to midnight) over 10 days are as diverse as ever. There are three films about Iranian women (“The Persian Version,” “Joonam” and “Shayda”), stories about transgender sex workers (“The Stroll,” “KOKOMO CITY”), indigenous people (“Twice Colonoized,” “Bad Press”), women’s rights and sexuality (“The Disappearance of Shere Hite”) and the war in Ukraine (“20 Days in Mariupol,” a joint project between The Associated Press and PBS “Frontline.”)
And, as always, there are intimate portraits of famous faces, like Michael J. Fox, Little Richard, Stephen Curry, Judy Blume, the Indigo Girls and Brooke Shields.
Lana Wilson (“ Miss Americana ”) directed the much-anticipated Shields documentary “Pretty Baby,” in which Shields reflects on her experiences from child model to teen superstar and beyond, including her complex relationship with her mother, Andre Agassi and the time Tom Cruise publicly criticized her for taking antidepressants.
“I kept coming back to this idea of agency and of her slowly gaining agency first over her mind, then over her career and then over her identity,” Wilson said.
If the past two years have proved anything, it’s that Sundance doesn’t need its picturesque mountainside location to thrive. After all, it was at a virtual edition that the festival hosted the premiere of “ CODA,” which would become the first Sundance movie to win best picture at the Oscars. “Summer of Soul,” another virtual Sundance premiere, also won best documentary last year, and both are getting encore, in-person screenings this year.
But even so, the independent film community — from the newcomers to the veterans — has felt the lack of the real thing. There is, after all, a certain magic about seeing a new film from an unknown in the dead of winter at 7,000 feet elevation wondering, as the lights go down in a cinema overflowing with puffy coats if you might just be among the first to witness the debut of the next Ryan Coogler or Kelly Reichardt.
Erik Feig, the founder and CEO of Picturestart, joked that he’s been going to the festival for “a billion years.” It’s where he saw “Thirteen” and hired Catherine Hardwicke to direct “Twilight,” and, years later, “Whiplash,” beginning a relationship with Damien Chazelle that would lead to “La La Land.” Sundance also is where he saw “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Little Miss Sunshine” for the first time, too, and others that “feel iconic and have been part of the cultural zeitgeist forever. That moment of discovery was at Sundance.”
This year, his company is coming armed with a new comedy that could very well enter that canon of Sundance discoveries: “Theater Camp,” a heartfelt satire of the musical theater world set at a crumbling upstate New York summer camp (AdirondACTS). The film is a collaboration of longtime friends Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman, Ben Platt and Noah Galvin.
“I felt so inspired by so many collectives of people that had come up together like Christopher Guest, The Groundlings, The Lonely Island, who made stuff with their friends,” Gordon, who co-directed and stars, said. “We thought, let’s make something about a world that we know really well and a world that we love. And because we love it, we can make a lot of fun of it.”
Some films offer moody genre escapes, like William Oldroyd’s adaptation of author Ottessa Moshfegh’s award-winning “Eileen” starring Thomasin McKenzie and Hathaway.
“It plays into the fantasy that I had as a young woman, like, can I run away and be a different person,” Moshfegh said. “I still kind of have that, especially in cinema because we watch movies in order to run away and be different people.”
Others promise to open minds about the lives of marginalized communities. Vuk Lungulov-Klotz, who is a transgender filmmaker of Chilean and Serbian descent, is hoping to push trans masculine narratives forward with his film “Mutt,” about a trans man who encounters three significant people he hasn’t seen in some time one hectic day in New York City.
“It’s really exciting to see people want to see stories about trans masculine people and also understand that they can see themselves reflected in us and that we’re not very different,” Lungulov-Klotz said.
Veteran indie filmmakers will be there with fresh offerings too like Ira Sachs (“Passages”) and Sebastián Silva (“Rotting in the Sun”). “Once” director John Carney has a new musical with Eve Hewson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (“Flora and Son”), Nicole Holofcener reunites with Julia Louis-Dreyfus in “You Hurt My Feelings” and Susanna Fogel adapts the viral New Yorker story “Cat Person” with Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun.
With COVID-19 outbreaks still happening, some events and gatherings are requiring tests and proof of vaccination. People like Luis Miranda Jr., coming with a documentary he helped produce, “Going Varsity in Mariachi,” is planning to mask up while celebrating the movie.
“We’re bringing real mariachis to Utah and will have a party with real mariachi music,” Miranda said excitedly.
The festival is embracing a different kind of hybrid approach after the success of previous years. Starting on Jan. 24, five days in, many of the films will be available to watch online for people who bought that now sold-out package.
Some films already have distributors in place but many do not and onlookers are interested to see how those acquisitions play out. After several years of deep pocketed streaming services making big plays, the market may have stabilized. Streamers are more cautious and traditional studios have learned how to compete.
Producer Tommy Oliver, the CEO and founder of Confluential Films, has four movies at the festival up for sale: “Fancy Dance,” “Young. Wild. Free,” “To Live and Die and Live” and “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.” He knows as well as any that Sundance isn’t just a place for celebration and discovery, but for connections too.
His advice for any first timers is simple: “Talk to everyone. Talk to the people who haven’t made stuff yet. Talk to the people who are hustling,” he said. “And be patient, because you’re going to look up in five, 10 years and they’ll have made ‘Fruitvale Station,’ they’ll have made ‘Beale Street.’”
The Sundance Film Festival runs from Jan. 19 through the 29.
Documentaries about Brooke Shields, Judy Blume and Michael J. Fox, films from veteran directors like Nicole Holofcener, an adaptation of the viral New Yorker story “Cat Person” and the feature directorial debut of actors Alice Englert and Randall Park are among the world premieres set for the Sundance Film Festival in January.
Programmers for the world’s most prestigious showcase for independent films announced the lineup for the 2023 edition on Wednesday. After two pandemic hobbled years, plans are in motion to return to Park City in full force for the festival which runs from January 19 through January 29, with stars like Anne Hathaway, Tiffany Haddish, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Alexander Skarsgård, Gael García Bernal, Cynthia Erivo, Daisy Ridley and Jonathan Majors headlining some of the 101 feature films in the slate. Tickets are currently on sale.
The festival which helped launch the careers of filmmakers from Steven Soderbergh to Ryan Coogler, is once again celebrating a diverse slate of features from first-time filmmakers. Among the narrative features premiering, 16 are from first time directors, 7 of whom are women. In feature documentaries 16 are from first timers and 14 of those are women.
“First time filmmakers are in the DNA of the festival. We’re always looking to find fresh voices to champion,” said Kim Yutani, the festival’s director of programming. “It’s such a pleasant surprise to look back and see those numbers and our program and to know that that organically happens.”
As always, there are exciting documentaries about well-known names. Lana Wilson’s “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields” charts the actor and model’s early days, when photographers and filmmakers depicted Shields in sexualized way as a very young girl, and how she found her agency. Davis Guggenheim in “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” looks at what happens when “an incurable optimist confronts an incurable disease.” There are also documentaries about Little Richard, food writer Ruth Reichl, pioneering Black fashion model Bethann Hardison and the Indigo Girls.
In the U.S. Dramatic Competition, the section in which “CODA” debuted in 2021 before going on to win best picture at the Oscars, Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman make their debut with “Theater Camp,” a Will Ferrell-produced comedy about a rundown theater camp in upstate New York scrambling to get ready for summer that stars Ben Platt. Jonathan Majors plays an amateur bodybuilder in Elijah Bynum’s “Magazine Dreams,” while Daisy Ridley shows her non-Star Wars chops in Rachel Lambert’s “Sometimes I Think About Dying,” which is among the day one premieres.
“Shortcomings,” an adaptation of Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel, is the debut of “Fresh Off the Boat” star Randall Park, who directs Justin H. Min, Sherry Cola and Ally Maki in a comedic, irreverent look at Asian Americans in the Bay Area.
Also making her feature directorial debut is Alice Englert with “Bad Behaviour,” a mother-daughter film about a former child actor, played by Jennifer Connelly, and mother to a stunt-performer daughter, who is looking for some enlightenment. Englert, whose own mother is Jane Campion, plays the daughter in the dark comedy about a toxic, co-dependent relationship, co-starrinng Ben Whishaw as a new age guru. Whishaw can also be seen alongside Adèle Exarchopoulos in Ira Sachs’ “Passages” about attraction and emotional abuse.
Fans of “The Bear” may take interest in “Fremont,” about a former military translator who now works at a Chinese fortune cookie factory and features a supporting performance from Jeremy Allen White, while Ayo Edebiri co-stars in “Theater Camp.”
“Succession” watchers will also find some of the show’s stars various films throughout the slate, like Sarah Snook getting to use her native Australian accent in Daina Reid’s “Run Rabbit Run,” about a fertility doctor grappling with ghosts from her past, and Nicholas Braun who lends a supporting hand in Susanna Fogel’s adaptation of “Cat Person,” starring Emilia Jones as the college student who gets involved with a 30-something man.
Jones also anchors “Fairyland,” the Sofia Coppola-produced and Andrew Durham-directed adaptation of Alyssa Abbott’s best-selling memoir about a father-daughter relationship in San Francisco at the dawn of the AIDs crisis.
The premieres section, which has debuted the likes of “Promising Young Woman” and “The Big Sick,” has many starry options. Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway co-star in William Oldroyd’s “Eileen” about a young secretary who becomes fascinated with a glamorous new counselor at the prison where she works in Massachusetts in 1964.
Sundance veteran and documentary director Roger Ross Williams makes his narrative debut with “Cassandro,” starring Gael García Bernal as Saúl Armendáriz, a gay amateur wrestler from El Paso who becomes an international star. And Nicole Holofcener reunites with Julia Louis-Dreyfus for “You Hurt My Feelings,” about a novelist who overhears her husband’s “honest reaction” to her new book.
Senior programmer John Nein noted that there are quite a few diaspora films represented in the various sections as well.
“They reflect the changing film cultures of some of the places from which they come,” he said.
Noora Niasari’s “Shayda” is about an Iranian woman (played by Zar Amir Ebrahimi ) with a 6-year-old daughter seeking refuge from an abusive relationship in a shelter in Australia. From the United Kingdom, there is “Girl,” from Adura Onashile about an 11-year-old and her mother who are from Africa. In the midnight section there is Nida Manzoor’s fun genre piece “Polite Society” about a wedding heist. And from the U.S., Sing J. Lee has “The Accidental Getaway Driver” about a Vietnamese cab driver taken hostage by escaped convicts in California.
There are dozens of documentaries that focus on some of the most pressing issues of the moment, too, like Razelle Benally’s “Murder in Big Horn,” about the deaths of Native women in rural Montana, Tracy Droz Tragos’ “PLAN C” about a grassroots organization in the U.S. fighting to expand access to abortion pills, and Nancy Schwartzman helps uncover a troubling pattern of women reporting sexual assault who are then charged with creating a false report in “Victim/Suspect.” “20 Days in Mariupol,” directed by AP videojournalist Mstyslav Chernov in partnership with Frontline, gives an unprecedented look at the work of Ukrainian journalists trapped in Mariupol at the beginning of the Russian invasion.
“These filmmakers reflect the world around us through bold and thrilling storytelling,” said Joana Vicente, CEO of the Sundance Institute. “It is critical for the arts to foster dialogue, especially during unprecedented times — these stories are needed to provoke discussion, share diverse viewpoints, and challenge us.”
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Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.
