Sundance 2024 is in full-swing in Park City, Salt Lake City, and — beginning on the 25th — online. I’m on the ground scurrying around the mountains to catch as much as I can. Keep an eye here (and @thesunbreak) for quick updates throughout the festival, with longer reviews to follow.
Category: Festivals
Movie Festivals around the world
Sundance 2024 Notebook: Between the Temples
Seems like this manic movie about a cantor who finds himself unable to sing (Jason Schwartzman) a year after the death of his wife who inexplicably finds himself volunteering to prepare his zany old music teacher (Carol Kane) for her adult bat mitzvah aims to capture how it feels like to be driven mad by family, religion, and grief. If so, mazel!
Sundance 2024 Notebook: The Greatest Night in Pop
Hard to believe there hasn’t already been an authoritative documentary on the making of “We Are the World”, but it’s still very cool to sit down in a room with Lionel Ritchie as he recounts the navigating the conception, songwriting, logistics, and personalities of getting so many stars to agree to record an overnight charity hit.
Sundance 2024 Notebook: The Mother of All Lies
Rather than taking the audience out of the action with recreations, she instead employs the use of meticulously handcrafted dioramas that pull both viewers and her subjects into the story in a manner rarely seen in documentary.
Slamdance Virtual Film Festival hits the ‘net tomorrow
Slamdance is in its 30th year of showing unique and truly independent films and is offering what most film festivals have decided to throw out the window: both in-person and virtual screenings.
Sundance 2024 Notebook: Sebastian
An important Sundance tradition is seeing surprisingly explicit gay sex scenes in public library. Last year it was Passages; this time it’s Sebastian, about an up-and-coming writer discovering himself through the world’s oldest profession: auto-fiction.
Sundance 2024 Notebook: Presence
In a series of single cooped-up takes Steven Soderbergh gives us a ghost’s eye view of a family slowly coming undone.
Sundance 2024 Notebook: Love Lies Bleeding
Between this and last year’s Magazine Dreams, someone in the Sundance programming department sure has a thing for bodybuilder body horror.
Sundance 2024 Notebook: Sasquatch Sunset
After sitting through two hours of the Zellner brother’s long-awaited, dialogue-free, scatalogical feature, I have come to the conclusion that the quotidian existence of America’s favorite hairy cryptozooid is perhaps a topic best left enshrouded in eternal mystery.
Sundance 2024 Notebook: The American Society of Magical Negroes
Conjuring something between Hogwarts and Kingsman, Kobi Libii imagines an “American Society of Magical Negroes” as a real world organization behind the “supportive black friend” trope.