Adamma Ebo’s film about a disgraced prosperity gospel preacher (Sterling K. Brown) and the church’s stand-by-your man “First Lady” (Regina Hall) on the precipice of an Easter resurrection, it plays like satire. It has the conceits of a mockumentary, with its oblivious subjects still under the impression that they can reshape their image through force of will and the power of positive projection.

The title of The Territory refers to a large swath of rainforest inhabited by the dwindling population of Uru-eu-wau-wau people, who first came into contact with non-Native Brazilians in 1981. Until recently, strict protections have made this land one of the few remaining bulwarks against the rampant clear-cutting that threatens to fundamentally erase the lush and biodiverse Amazon river basin.
Alex Pritz’s documentary juxtaposes life among the Uru-eu-wau-wau with those of indigent farm workers seeking to establish their own settlements within the untouched lands as a way of elevating themselves from poverty.

Rönkkö and Mimmi are best friends, the kind of buddies that tell each other everything, wear each others’ clothes, and support each other through thick and thin. Throw in more than a few hormones, discovering what your body wants, and how to even talk to someone you’re interested in and you’ve got the jumbled pile we call puberty; that’s exactly where we find these two women.

Last weekend, the Sundance Film Festival concluded its second year of holding the festival entirely online. After returning from the virtual mountaintops and packing away our imaginary snow boots, Josh, Chase, and Morgen unpack some of our highlights, lowlights, and predictions from our ten days in virtual Park City.

The Sundance Film Festival announced all of its awards on Friday afternoon, with audience awards going to Navalny, Cha Cha Real Smooth, Girl Picture, The Territory, and Framing Agnes. Grand jury prizes were awarded to Nanny, The Exiles, Utama, and All That Breathes. I had missed a bunch of these during the premiere and second-screening windows; so I was grateful that the festival dedicated its final weekend to third showings of all of them so that I could catch up with a few more before packing up my virtual snow boots until next year.

A futuristic look at life and death that still deals with the same struggles Black people suffer through today whether they’re American, Australian or African. Neptune Frost follows one person’s journey through life, the afterlife, and beyond in this strange tale of what it means to survive through the lens of social justice and technology.

What if you found out you were going to school, and even best friends with, a complete stranger? That’s the oddly intriguing premise of this strange, winding documentary. A young man named Brandon Lee enrolled at Bearsden Academy, a secondary school in a ritzy suburb of Glasgow, Scotland. Over the course of the next year or so, he went from a nobody to the lead in the school play, everyone’s pal and the life of the party. Little did they know, he had a secret that would throw everyone he’d met there for a loop.

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.