SUNDANCE Film Festival 2018 Jan 18, 2018 – Jan 28

[Chris Knipp]

Keira Knightley in Colette

US Dramatic Competition: first looks.

Hoffman of the Guardian has high praise for Kindergarten Teacher, which stars Maggie Gyllenhaal as the teacher, who gets way too involved in a boy in her charges who has a strange poetic gift. He says this is one of Maggie's best performances and the movie is great. The only catch: it's a remake of Nadav Lapid's 2014 Israeli film (ND/NF 2015). Is that necessary? Hoffman says Why not? He also gives an all-star rating to experienced documentarian Jennifer Fox's potentially controversial feature film The Tale, which stars Laura Dern and is about child sexual abuse. Ellen Burstyn plays Dern's mother. It bored him, then disturbed him so much he wanted to throw up, but he liked that. He wants people to see this film, but will never want to see it again.

Hoffman also liked, but minus one star, Wash Westmoreland’sColette (Guardian again), about the French writer, with a good performance, he says, by Keira Knightley. Dominic West plays Colette's husband, Willy, and also is fine, Hoffman says; and the film subtle and nuanced. The only trouble for me, but a big one, would be this is a historical film about France that's all in English. A needless prejudice, no doubt, but a strong one.

Owen Gleiberman of Variety likes Ethan Hawke's Blaze, an unusual portrait of a blowsy, "dissolute country-blues singer", Blaze Foley told "in a redneck-verité style that's as delicate as it is daring." It's meandering and random, yet "beautifully made," selling its offbeat style and less than stellar subject, a minor country-blues singer who died at 39 but left some songs that entered the genre's repertoire.

Gleiberman again has good things to say about Wildlife, actor Paul Dano's, you may be surprised to see, directorial debut (you might have expected one earlier). It's an "artfully deliberate small-town saga, with Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal as haunted parents, with young Australian actor Ed Oxenbould as their "sensitive and owlish" 14-year-old son. Here is a family saga that hasn't any trendy issue topic, but is just a study of people - and of changes happening toward the end of the Fifties. Dano wrote the screenplay with his partner, Zoe Kazan, adapting a novel by Richard Ford set in Great Falls, Montana. Gleiberman's loving description of this movie, about unpredictable adults observed from the point of view of the adolescent boy, makes you want to see it.

Juliet, Naked, also described admiringly by Gleiberman, is directed by Jesse Peretz and stars Ethan Hawke as Tucker Crowe, a musical n'er-do-well who gave up performing, but turns to being responsible toward a series of children he's sired by different women. He goes to London to see one who's pregnant, and is confronted by others he's responsible to, as well as Duncan, his greatest fan, played by Chris O'Dowd.


Robin Williams in Come Inside My Mind

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US Documentary Competition.
The Guardian gives minus two stars to two documentaries from the festival. Benjamin Lee likes, but not wholly, Queen of Versailles director Lauren Greenfield's new skewering of consumer capitalism, entitled Generation Wealth. Greenfield, who has been working on this topic for 25 years, is brilliant when talking about the way money ruins people's lives, but this one gets sidetracked too much with talking about her own family, Lee feels.

Guardian critic (new?) Charlie Phillips sort of likes a new doc by Marina Zenovich called Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind. Fascinating archival footage, Phillips says, but the film fails to go deep or see the bigger picture; not enough analysis or "assessment" of Williams' contradictions between manic silliness and surprisingly serious appraisals of the world; a failure to "pursue darker strands" in the story. Owen Gleiberman in Variety is less fussy about the Robin Williams film, calling it "conventional but beautifully made" and complementing it in many ways, pointing out the film is rich in rare outtakes and previously unseen footage, like an "acceptaince speech" Williams gave in immitation of Jack Nicholson when Nicholson won the 2003 Critics Choice Award for About Schmidt, but was "too baked" to go up and give a speech himself.

Hollywood Reporter descries in not terribly involving detail This Is Home, a TV-ready (and slightly bland and generic) documentary about Syrian refugees adjusting to life in the US. It focuses on a series of families or parts of families in Baltimore, where 400 of the 21,000 Syrian refugees accepted into the US were sent by 2016.

The Tale sounds repulsive; The Kindergarten Teacher, derivative; Colette in the wrong language; Generation Wealth diffuse. Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind sounds like the one among these Sundance films so far to seek out - and also Wildlife.

[Chris Knipp]

Monsters and Men

More Sundance: two urban films focused on race.

Switching to the LA Times, which now has Justin Chang, former head critic for Variety, at the center of its movie reviewing, we find Blindspotting, first feature of Carlos López Estrada, a movie delivering a lovingly spot-on picture of the San Francisco Bay Area, especially Oakland, "envisioned here as both a locus of fast-encroaching gentrification and a seething cauldron of racial anxiety." The focus is on two men, played by the joint authors of the screenplay, Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, as best friends and moving-van driver co-workers, united by a love of hip-hop, who're trying to avoid contact with the police. Diggs is a star of Hamilton, and the movie is almost a "a full-on slamming, rhyming musical." It's a little too over-explanatory and exaggerated, Chang thinks, but is "conceptually audacious" and "bristling with energy and ambition."

Monsters and Men "covers some of the same ground to less attention-grabbing but quietly superior effect" and is "tough-minded and boldly unresolved." By another first-time filmmaker, Reinaldo Marcus Green, this is "a triptych of stories unfolding in present-day Brooklyn, each set in motion by another fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man." A video of one killing is posted online. Peaceful protests follow but also anti-police violence. The focus settles on Dennis (John David Washington), a black cop caught between two worlds, profiled by white cops when off duty, criticized by family for being part of the problem. Three men of color are "posed at a moral crossroads."

[Chris Knipp]

Leave No Trace

Sundance reviews from Indiewire: Debra Granik returns; and another Moonlight?

Debra Granik made waves with her 2010 Winter's Bone (SFIFF 2010), which incidentally put Jennifer Lawrence on the map. Now she's back in Sundance's Premieres section with Leave No race, about a homeless father and daughter living in a Park in Portland. David Erlich describes it in Indiewire as "modest but extraordinarily graceful." It's also surprisingly upbeat for a tale about people on the margins. But Erlich admits this film meanders and is not always gripping, and Will (Hell and High Wager's Ben Foster) and Tom (New Zealand actress Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) sometimes are so generalized they become generic. Mike D'Angelo (Letterboxd) gives it 68/100, wishes Viggo Mortensen had played Will instead of the lead in Captain Fantastic(" In a less wacky register, obviously") and says "this confirms Granik as a major talent."

Eric Kohn again in Indidewire describes the wildly violent Midnight movie Mandy in which Nicolas Cage goes on a revenge rampage killing everyone in sight because he's lost someone. Not to be confused with Cage's other recent outing Mom and Dad, a nightmarish fantasy about a time when a 24-hour mass hysteria turns parents violently against their own children.

Jeremiah Zagar's We the Animals "is this year's Moonlight, says Eric Kohn in Indiewire. He also suggests it's cut-rate or "lower class" Terrence Malick, and concerns a half-latino boy living in a marginal family in upstate New York and discovering his queerness while running semi-wild among siblings and other odd locals in a narrative, based on a novel, that spans an undefined time period. From the Next section of Sundance.

[Chris Knipp]

Rust - cinematography bby Rui Poças

From the US and World Dramatic Competitions

From Vanity Fair comes a review of Sebastián Silva's Tyrel, which Jordan Hoffman (apparently omnipresent) describes as this year's Get Out (but lacking its horror fantasy element). Jason Mitchell plays Tyler, a lone black guy amid a bevy of white dudes (including actors Christopher Abbott, Caleb Landry Jones and Nico Arze and several others, including Michael Cera) who like to drink and light fires, on an unruly weekend outing in upstate New York that never feels right and turns increasingly uncomfortable for Tyler, whom they start calling Tyrel. Hoffman says this is "a fast and lean film" and "an absolute workout for its outstanding cast" as well as "a devilish roller coaster ride for audiences" that is "funny, disturbing, cringeworthy, nerve-wracking and, for some, will feel a little too realistic." Dennis Harvey provides a more cool-headed and thorough description of this movie in Variety. A lean 86 minutes. US Dramatic Competition.

Brazilian director Aly Muritiba's Rust concerns a trendy subject: a scandal among youths due to a sex video from a misplaced smartphone getting distributed at a school. It would be of interest if only because it was shot by Rui Poças, the Portuguese cinematographer for such handsome films as The Ornithologist, Tabu and Lucrecia Martel's Zama. It's described by Guy Lodge in Variety. 99 minutes. From the World Dramatic Competition.

[Chris Knipp]

Skate Kitchen

More Sundance features: Oscar Wilde, a woman with Alzheimer's, a gang of skateboarders on the Lower East Side.

Ruppert Everett's The Happy Prince in which he stars and directs himself in a film he wrote imagining the final days of Oscar Wilde that others have avoided, is most thoroughly and admiringly reviewed (4/5 stars) by Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian. He provides a richly informed and opinionated description of the film, which he calls "a deeply felt, tremendously acted tribute to courage." In Everett's film, Wilde is reunited with Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas and both are cut off from funds for humiliation and struggle in Naples and Paris. Wilde dies sick and penniless but brave. All agree this is a role Everett was born for; he has played Wilde before, notably in David Hare's play The Judas Kiss, to which his screenplay owes some debt. In the Premieres section.

Actor-playwright Elizabeth Chomko's What They Had is a drama about a family confronting its matriarch's Alzheimer's disease reviewed by Dennis Harvey in Variety (runtime 100 minutes). The cast includes Hilary Swank as the daughter, Michael Shannon as the brother, Robert Forster as the husband, and Blythe Danner as the aging victim of this disease of aging, which is becoming more common in America. Doesn't our President have it? Will he one day be found wandering the streets of D.C. in a nightgown like Danner's character? Mostly the film is done well, Harvey thinks, with awards possibilities for the actors, but the back-story home movies set the characters a decade too early for their ages. Also from the Premieres section.

Andrew Barker of Variety reviews Crystal Moselle's Skate Kitchen. Moselle deservedly won the 2015 Grand Jury Documentary Prize at Sundance for The Wolfpack, which concerned "seven cinema-obsessed, shut-in Manhattan siblings." Back to the Lower East Side of Manhattan again this time for another kind of pack, female this time. The girl-gang of skateboarders called "Skate Kitchen" she works with for this feature is real, but Moselle gives them names and roles, while encouraging them to be themselves too. The result shows "the lengths to which young women must go to clear out a little breathing room in testosterone-heavy spaces, but it is first and foremost an irresistible hangout movie" that might "land well" in cinemas, Barker says. Its interest isn't anything uniquely original but its ability to catch life on the fly. From the Sundance Next section.

[Chris Knipp]

Docs and stuff.


The notorious RBG

Morgan Neville's Won't You Be My Neighbor is a 93-minute film about PBS's influential, odd, and beloved Mr. Rogers from the Sundance Documentary Premieres section. It does not reveal any deep, dark secrets. "The is not a complex portrait," says Amy NIcholson in Variety. Fred Rogers was going to enter seminary, then went into television instead to oppose slapstick violence. He hated superheroes and campaigned against Christopher Reeves. The Sundance audience applauded at the end, more for the man than the film, Neville thinks.

Seeing Allred is a doc about the California gedner equality and LGBT rights advocate, Gloria Allred. The Guardian critic Leslie Felperin says, "There’s a long list of impressive achievements in this in-depth look at the lawyer and gender equality advocate but there’s a level of grit that’s missing." 3/5 stars.

Two Afro-Brits get mixed ratings in their Sundance outings. Jordan Hoffman () gives Idris Elba's directorial debut Yardie only 2/5 stars, and calls it "an uneven disappointment." It's an adaptation of Victor Headley’s 1992 novel, a coming of age tale set in Jamaica and Britain of someone who runs afoul of the drug trade. But Hoffman regrets to say that despite some moments that really sing it doesn't hang together. Hoffman gives the same low 2/5 stars rating to Chiwetel Ejiofor's start turn as a Pentacostal preacher in Come Sunday, directed by Joshua Marston, 2/5 stars. Both he and Variety's Peter Debruge grant Ejiofor is excellent in the role, but the film lacks the intellectual depth it needs. Debruge says this is a perfect Netflix film, bringing a serious Christian drama to the heartlands, which as a regular theatrical release would have lacked the edge to sell tickets. A backhanded compliment? Perhaps.

A Supreme Court Justice who's not going to stop as long as she "can go full steam." And she still can. There is a documentary portrait (Julie Cohen, Betsy West) of the 84-year-old (but not retiring) Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, called RBG, and RBG herself was almost onhnnd and more of a story than the doc. Her appearances were SRO, and she had much to say, chatting with NPR’s Nina Totenberg a range of topics, about the film, about the #metoo movement, and the backlash against it, and about Kate McKinnon, the actress who played an outsize version of her on Saturday Night Live, whom she said she liked.

Watch Ruth Bader Ginsberg hold court at Sundance HERE. WARNING: skip about 35 minutes in - the interview actually begins there. They don't call her "the Notorious RBG" for nothing.


Gloria Allred at Sundance 2018.

[Chris Knipp]

Big seller: Assassination Nation inks Sundance 2018's largest deal.


Assassination Nation

There's been an article protesting there are no "masterpieces" among the lineup (Owen Gleiberman for Variety: "Where Are the Masterpieces? Sorry, There Are None.") That seems to be true. There are no raves. Wait for Cannes, Venice, Toronto. Something will come along. Luck of the draw. But now we have a movie buyers think will be big box office.

It's hard to make much sense of Variety's review by Amy Nicholson of Sam Levinson's Midnight - normally horror movie - section creation, Assassination Nation. But we can give the outline. She calls it a "furious fempowerment thriller." The plot centers on four teenage girls in a small suburb who take up arms after their personal texts and sexually suggestive selfies are leaked by an anonymous hacker. Nicholson starts out with the idea of imagining what it would be like if back in the time of the Salem witchcraft trials they had had Twitter. Social media is the mob, magnified. But what this movie aims to prove, how this idea plays out, even what the title means, is a little hard to follow from reviews. In my experience, social media films have been fairly unsuccessful, and pretty creepy. It's a tough subject for a movie. Most of the cast names are unfamiliar, except Bill Skårsgard ("minus theIt makeup" - he plays the iconic scary clown in that unpleasant movie). Nevertheless Assassination Nation has scored the biggest yet 2018 Sundance deal, (see Variety), selling for over $10 million to two new companies, Neon and AGBO. Producers see money here because it appears to provide a feminist take on the revenge theme. "The pact provides a jolt of energy to a moribund sales market," says Variety. Neon is connected with I, Tonya, which is getting Oscar noms; they partnered with AGBO for this deal. Perhaps they hope this has some of the Get Out genes: that film debuted in Sundance's Midnight section last year. This one owes some debuts to John Carpenter and like Get Out, ends in violence. "Assassination Nation is really a buildup to the violence but the climax does not disappoint," says the website Bloody Disgusting, which maybe ought to know.