A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
question for another day, but if you’re going to make one — as Oliver Hermanus did — there’s perhaps no one quite like Kazuo Ishiguro to craft a symphonic tribute to the deep wells of emotion lurking within the stoic reserved protocols of a formal bureaucracy.
Conceived and filmed during the pandemic, Lena Dunham’s return to feature filmmaking is the most mind-boggling misfire that I’ve seen at the festival so far.
Sundance has gained a reputation as a launching pad for documentary films that are bound to catch popular attention. Brief reviews of some of the festival’s highlights, including stories about Boeing, Kanye West, and Lucy and Desi.
most certainly dive headlong into Sundance’s ample genre programming for legitimate horror movies, but I can’t think of any or them more terrifying to the ego than sitting down for a music documentary about a bunch of “era-defining” bands as a way of being forced to confront the fact that the soundtrack from your early twenties has now aged into fodder for the archival treatment. Working from groundwork laid by Lizzy Goodman’s book of the same title, directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace have assembled a clear-eyed collage of the “rebirth of rock” that exploded from New York City in the early 2000s.
After Columbus, about two people quietly getting to know each other on an impromptu architectural tour of a small town, became a surprise critical darling, many were curious about where Kogonada would go next. The answer: to the future with Colin Farrell. Seeing his new film, After Yang, during its stateside premiere at Sundance this weekend also answered the question of whether there would be any truly great movies shown at this festival and/or released in 2022.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 2021 moviegoing ever-so-gingerly got back to something resembling normal. Sundance, SXSW, and SIFF stayed online, but by the late summer with vaccinations and testing I was lucky enough to get back into theaters for a couple glorious weekends of Telluride and TIFF. For the welcome thrill of getting back to the big screen, I was more than happy to show a vaccine card and wear a mask. Between festivals and the immense privilege of press screenings, I got to see quite a few of my favorites in cinemas while feeling relatively safe.
I’m not sure if these are “the best” per se, but they’re films experiences that stood out the most as I look back on the year.
