Festivals Previews

Sundance Film Festival is Back in Person and Online

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 Year End Lists

Josh’s Favorite Films of 2022

In 2022 it felt like moviegoing came (almost) all the way back (for the seemingly dwindling number of people who were willing to go into the theaters). As the year winds to a close, we’re sharing lists of our favorite films we’ve seen (so far).

Reviews

Avatar: the Way of Water makes a giant splash

More than a decade in the making, James Cameron has at long last returned to Pandora, the lush reource-rich moon inhabited by tall blue cat people with swimmers builds that put Michael Phelps to shame, whose bioluminescent nature consciousness was the setting for his own massively-successful and boundary-pushing success Avatar. It’s a three hour long trip to the cutting edge of filmmaking technologies, a three-dimensional marvel of variable frame rates, and a story of a family on the run that demands to be seen in a cinema, nausea be damned.

Reviews

At long last EO, the year’s best donkey, arrives in Seattle

It’s a big year for donkeys on film, but although Jenny is a sparkling figure in The Banshees of Inisherin, there’s no competition for my favorite. That’s an easy call. On a minute-by-minute basis, I have seen no film this year as surprising in framing, construction, and plotting than Jerzy Skolimowski’s truly dazzling film EO.