A deadpan delight with Karen Gillan at her best in a multifaceted performance, Dual is absolutely one of the finest works of the fest thus far.
Category: Festivals
Movie Festivals around the world
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.
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.
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.
MVFF: Paper and Glue
JR has been an incredible street arts for decades now, starting out as a graffiti artist and moving on to photography, large scale street art and so much more. In the same vein as Banksy, he has something to say and says it with his work. Now traveling the world to literally cover it with his images, he finds unique ways to unite and teach folks you’d never expect to see in one space together much less working together to create art. Spanning three very different projects (and many stories) this documentary shows intense, beautiful, and revelatory experiences affecting everyone involved.
MVFF: Sami, Joe and I
Teenage strife is the same no matter where you grow up, and Sami, Joe and I digs deep into three such lives that have more than their faire share. While trio of young women have grown up in the same town, they have a diverse family life each with their own set of troubles.
MVFF: Celts
Set in Belgrade/Yugoslavia in ’93, Marijana dedicates her day, her life, to her family. Today she’s making sure everything is ready for her daughter Minja’s birthday: fixing the food, inviting the kids, opening her home to family and friends all the while quietly holding a lingering sadness brought on by age, a dwindling sex life and tensions throughout her country. The party begins and we’re split off into two worlds, one where the kiddos celebrate through the veneer of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme while the adults talk about politics, sexual freedoms, new and old loves, and everything in between.
MVFF: The Last Film Show
Fascinated from the moment light hit the screen, young Samay is hooked on moving pictures. A strict father insisting the film industry is made up of sleaze and nothing else, the precocious nine-year-old is even more drawn in. Skipping school to watch everything he can get his eyes on, he befriends the man running the projector at his local movie house and learns everything there is to know about splicing and reels eating up every last morsel of knowledge he can grab…
MVFF: Queen of Glory deals with loss and love with a delightful cast
Sarah is steeped in a world of scientific study and dissertations; that world suddenly stops with just a single phone call, her mother has died of a sudden aneurism. Not only has she lost someone dear to her but she’s thrown into the deep end of caring for her funeral arrangements, both American and Ghanaian. She’s much more familiar and comfortable with the former, but the culture and customs of her mother’s homeland go way over her head.
NIGHTSTREAM 2021: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, The Greenhouse
Two NIGHTSTREAM films exploring time travel in lightly sci-fi ways: one a fun Japanese comedy, and one a grief-infused Australian family drama.









