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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

In a series of single cooped-up takes Steven Soderbergh gives us a ghost’s eye view of a family slowly coming undone.

Between this and last year’s Magazine Dreams, someone in the Sundance programming department sure has a thing for bodybuilder body horror.

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.

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.

Remember 2020? Theda Hammel’s period piece finds John Early as Terry Goon (lol), a harried, incompetent, Covid-conscious caretaker for his exoticized model nephew who’s recovering in isolation from a broken leg.