Reviews

Sundance 2022: Call Jane

In her first feature as director, Carole screenwriter Phyliss Nagy, steps behind the camera and casts Elizabeth Banks in a melodrama about a Chicago housewife whose frustrated pursuit of a life-saving abortion leads her into the heart of a clandestine collective of women connecting those in need with vital services. Set in 1968, its occasionally valedictory tone also serves as an uncomfortable warning as near-daily headlines threaten for history to repeat itself.

Festivals Reviews

Sundance 2022: A Love Song

Without a doubt, there is nothing at this year’s festival that will ever quite be like A Love Song. The serene beauty of the film’s vision rips the breath away, showing the detail in everything from the dazzling landscapes to the etchings in the faces of the kind people that inhabit them. It is a story about love, loneliness, and what life is like when you find yourself on your own.

Festivals Reviews

Sundance 2022: When You Finish Saving the World

There comes a time in every young actor’s life when he must graduate from playing the type of roles that made him famous and start directing other actors in the type of roles that made him famous. Here, in the Sundance premiere of his directorial debut, Jesse Eisenberg casts Finn Wolfhard in a Very Jesse Eisenberg Role — a precocious teen who attempts to mask soul-crushing insecurity under a thick coat of boastful bravado — as Ziggy Katz, a semi-successful TikTok Teen whose alternative-influenced emo folk music has earned him 20,000 followers on a verified top-performing account, but isn’t “political enough” to win the affections of a deeply-engaged, highly-informed girl at school who’s barely aware of his existence.

Festivals Previews

Sundance Film Festival is Virtual and Local

Despite the best laid plans to leverage last year’s fully virtual experience and start 2022 with a hybrid in-person and online festival, this winter’s steep Omicron surge found the Sundance Film Festival again pivoting to a mostly virtual format. Once again, film lovers, journalists, and critics will be experience the annual kick-off of independent film festival season mostly from their couches.

Reviews

The Tragedy of Macbeth is a prestige production of power madness

And so it is, in the midst of our own slow-burning pandemic, that Joel Coen has chosen a film adaptation of The Scottish Play for his first stint as a solo-credited director. In a way it is unsurprising that after decades of making films with his brother that found the Shakespearean drama among the base instincts, small-minded greed, and ordinary human foibles he would turn to the Bard’s most compact tragedy. But it is somewhat amazing how straightforward and seriously he plays the political thriller about an ambitious warrior with an even more ambitious wife who conspire to take the throne through bloody regicide.

Reviews

New Scream is a killer good time

Love is seen in every frame and sequence that is in conversation with itself, deploying and then subverting tropes with reckless abandon in the brilliant way that only a Scream film could.