Sundance 2020

[Chris Knipp]

An eye-opening doc about social media and a Mirandy July movie.


STILL FROM THE SOCIAL DILEMMA

THE SOCIAL DILEMMA (Jeff Orlowski) asks about the ethics of social media - and ultimately, as a result, whether we should wind up uninstalling it all. Orlowski is the proven documentarian of CHASING ICE (Filmleaf 2012 and CHASING CORAL. This features former Silicon Valely stars who started social media and then who turned around to question the whole thing and have gotten out of it. The main speaker is an Orlowski colleague at Stanford, Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google, now head of the Center for Humane Technology. HOLLYWOOD REPORTER'S Leslie Felperin says this "manages to unpack this perplexing issue with precision" yet avoiding "any moral panic-mongering, condescension or dumbing down the complexity of the science stuff." David Erlich of INDIEWIRE calls this documentary "horrifyingly good." CHASING ICE was horrifyingly good - so I'm ready to believe this new one also goes deep and is essential.

KAJILLIONAIRE (Miranda July). The festival blurb reads: "Low-stakes grifters, Old Dolio and her parents invite a chipper young woman into their insular clan, only to have their entire world turned upside down. Cast: Evan Rachel Wood, Gina Rodriguez, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger." This has a Metascore and it's 80% based on 11 reviews. Bilge Ebiri, now of THE VERGE, says this may be July's "bet film yet" (his headline). KAJILLIONAIRE is the mistress of the twee's first in nearly a decade, following the 2011 THE FUTURE (Filmleaf SFIFF 2011) about an alike-looking, terminally tentative couple. This one by the maker of the popular debut YOU AND I AND EVERYONE WE KNOW might just be her best yet: so says Bilge Ebiri of VULTURE. The subject is an Los Angeles family of con artists and is well-crafted, patience-testing, and more abstract than previously, highlighting the absurdity of our world that we barely notice, to quote some of the 11 Metacritic reviews that add up to an 80% score. The plot focus is on the long-coming meltdown of the family's overly-isolated home-schooled daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) called Old Dolio. She's bound to break out. But someone the family meets on a plane trip is also important. Peter Debruge of VARIETY says it's all "less about the con than it is the connection." Debruge is a declared Miranda July fan, and admires the "insights" the new film provides "into what it means to be human."

[Chris Knipp]

A quiet study of poor people.


SHANE PAUL MCGHIE AND RICHARD JENKINS IN THE LAST SHIFT

THE LAST SHIFT (Andrew Cohn) - the director has made related documentaries - was originally an Alexander Payne project, and he did executive produce. Richard Jenkins plays a retiring career fast food worker in the "shit hole" town of Albion, Mich. who's changed, maybe, by training his young black successor (Shane Paul McGhie), a once-promising African American writer on probation for defacing a public monument, whose girlfriend's law school has been derailed too. David Rooney of HOLLYWOOD REPORTER calls this "a funny-sad chamber piece" and it evidently has subtle shifts and subverts expectations in interesting ways, though it just may be too drab and downbeat for many. Amy Nicholson of VARIETY alludes to a "gut punch" and says it's "wonderfully sad."

[Chris Knipp]

Sudan and Saudia in two Sundance films.


STILL FROM SAUDI RUNAWAY

HIS HOUSE (Remi Weekes) is a debut feature that's an unusual mix of social commentary and horror as it depicts a Sudanese family seeking asylum in England whose life is torture both in their house and out of it, according to Benjamin Lee of GUARDIAN (he gives it four stars). The escape by sea is covered, one that's touched by tragedy. Once in England, rules of the couple's asylum means they can't vacate the rundown house in a village they're given, no matter what, says Tim Grierson in SCREEN DAILY, even when the house starts spooking them, and we get " Terror laced with social commentary." "Weekes surprises us with his ingenuity and the depth of his themes," says Grierson.

SAUDI RUNAWAY (Susanne Regina Meures) is a documentary about the escape of a young Saudi woman from an arranged marriage compiled from cell phone footage shot by Muna. The film was made in collaboration between the two women at a distance via phone and encryption. Superficially Saudi Arabia has been relaxing its restrictions, but the country remains deeply conservative and repressive of women. This records the run-up to Muna's escape, Adrian Horton of GUARDIAN explains in a Sundance report. Sheri Linden of HOLLYWOOD REPORTER adds that though this is a well-off family, the father beats his young son. Muna goes through with the wedding since the honeymoon in Abu Dhabi will be her chance to escape. It's risky and dangerous - but the film reports that a thousand women escape from Saudi weddings every year.

[Chris Knipp]

Titles there was a buzz about. Add these to your Sundance Best List.


NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS

NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS (Eliza Hittman) from the maker of BEACH RATS has a Metascore of 92%! The premise: A pair of teenage girls in rural Pennsylvania travel to New York City to seek out medical help after an unintended pregnancy. Andrew Barker (VARIETY) calls it "a quietly devastating gem" and a "significant step forward from BEACH RATS and its predecessor IT FELT LIKE LOVE. VULTURE writer Alison Willmore points to this as a "spiritual cousin" of the celebrated Romanian abortion film [I]4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days[/I] (NYFF 2007) and says this account may be bleaker than it needs to be, but not as bleak as Ceacescu's Romania. (Many analyses can be found on Metacritic.) In his Best Of Sundance 2020 roundup A.A. Dowd of AVCLUB thinks this may win the fiction feature prize.

BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS (Bill and Turner Ross) is "Think LEAVING LOS VEGAS meets 'Cheers,' says Leslie Felperin on HOLLYWOOD REPORTER. It "brings a profound eye to a day in a dive bar," explains Jordan Raup in THE FILM STAGE. Like their admired previous film WESTERN (ND/NF 2015), this blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction, but it premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition section at Sundance. Already much reviewed, it has a current Metascore of 83%.

SCARE ME (Josh Ruben). The director stars with Aya Cash as two writers telling each other stories during a rural blackout. Until, says John DeFore in HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, Ruben decides something besides the antagonism of the two interlocutors should happen.

BLACK BEAR (Lawrence Michael Levine) is "twisty meta-exploration of the creative process and its toll on relationships," says David Rooney of HOLLYWOOD REPORTER. An artistic couple retired to the country (a "lakeside home in the Adirondacks") is hosting a writer-director attempting to write, but neurotic sparks of conflict are flyingbetween the three people get in the way of progress. It's all self-conscious, self-reflective, and hermetic. In "Part Two: The Bear by the Boat House," everything shifts, Rooney reveals, to unfold a "wrap day from hell on the shoot of a film within the film" and the cast triangle is reconfigured (how cannot be revealed). Brian Tallerico of ROGEREBERT.COM suggests this be paired with the Elizabeth Moss vehicle SHIRLEY for two neurotic portraits, BLACK BEAR too being an "actors showcase."

[A.A. Dowd of AVCLUB'S Sundance best list starts out with THE ASSISTANT ( Kitty Green), the portrait of a young woman assistant of a powerful, abusive executive and THE CLIMB (Michael Angelo Covino), the study of the friendship of two cyclists over many years (with an 82% Metascore). But as Dowd acknowledges both these films, though shown at this year's Sundance Festival, really debuted at Telluride (and Cannes) last year, so we can't include them here. We can watch for them, however.]

[Chris Knipp]

Best documentary?


RENE GARZA INBOY'S STATE

BOYS STATE (Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine) gets a total rave from Jason Gormer of SLASHFILM: "Smart, entertaining, darkly comic and profoundly unsettling, BOYS STATE is simply brilliant, the best film of Sundance, and already in contention to be one of the best films of the year," he says. Focused on the "Boys State" summer program tun by the American Legion in various states across the country as dispatched in this case to Austin, Texas to run in mock elections, the documentary focuses on four keenly political youths, whom Gormer describes. John DeFore of HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, who attended Texas Boy's state himself as a youth and was disenchanted by it, approaches this film with skepticism. He opines that the American Legion ought to reimagine its program, "and add an apostrophe after 'boys' while they're at it." He argues that these four boys can't stand for the thousand at the gathering. In their need "to squeeze this strange experience into a familiar doc template," DeFore says, the filmmmakers have done some serious distorting. Andrew Kaufman's SCREENDAILY review more moderately suggests that this film uses "a combination of luck and proficient editing" as well as a judicious choice of personalities, but still shows today's party divisiveness and dirty tricks. SCREENDAILY also finds much to admire in the film's " unassuming hero, Steven Garza," the son of Mexican immigrants, and his chief rival for the Boys State governership, Rene Otero, "a supremely charismatic African American former Chicagoan" who like Garza seems out of place but rises "through the ranks" through his remarkable oratorical skills. If this sounds stimulating, Apple and A24 may have done right to pick the film up. This team's THE OVERNIGHTERS (2014) is one of the most memorable documentaries I've seen in recent years, so this film comes with strong credentials. Possibly a dissent? Mike D'Angelo indicates on his website that he walked out.

[Chris Knipp]

More from Sundance 2020 "Best Lists" (VARIETY'S).


TIME

ZOLA (Janicza Bravo) is based on a true story that emerged through "a notorious tweetstorm." It "takes a slow dive through the looking glass into the mind-bending tawdriness of the sex-industry inferno" by following two strippers, one with good sense and one not, who go down to Tampa for a "weekend engagement at an exotic-dance emporium." This is "The most audacious film at Sundance this year, and maybe the most powerful," say Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge, two veteran reviewers of VARIETY who include it in their combined two-man list of the 13 Best Films of Sundance 2020. The rest in this VARIETY Best List are:

THE DISSIDENT, THE FATHER, THE GLORIAS, HERSELF, KAJILLIONAIRE, THE KILLING OF TWO LOVERS, MINARI, ON THE RECORD, PALM SPRINGS, PROMISING YOUNG WOMEN, SHIRLEY, and TIME.

We need to take a moment describe three of these - HERSELF, THE KILLING OF TWO LOVERS, and TIME - not mentioned yet on this Filmleaf thread.

HERSELF (Phyllida Lloyd) is "about a battered wife who builds her own house," and Peter Debruge of VARIETY calls this Irish-set tale "the standout of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival." Phillida Lloyd is the MAMMA MIA director. The film, summarizes Kate Erbland of INDIEWIRE, " traces Sandra’s journey from doting mother and abused wife to emancipated woman, thanks to her own ability to dream big in the face of overwhelming obstacles." And Eerbland feels Lloyd mostly steers clear of clichés - much helped in this by the strong lead performance of Clare Dunne, says Fionnuala Halligan of SCREENDAILY , that pulls the "comfortable rug away."

THE KILLING OF TWO LOVERS (Robert Machoian) is really about "the pain of marital separation," says Dennis Harvey's VARIETY review, especially when one partner wants reconciliation and the other wants to separate "as is so often the case," Harvey notes of this "stripped down but emphatic indie drama," as he calls it. It is the man who wants to save the marriage and the family. This sounds like one of my favorite films of 2019 - nearly my favorite - Noah Baumbach's MARRIAGE STORY(NYFF 2019 Centerpiece Film) - and in HOLLYWOOD REPORTER David Rooney calls this a "rural counterpart" to Baumbach's film: so how is it different? It's about far more marginal people, "somewhat desolate, probably financially hard-pressed environment"; not about a rising star in Hollywood and a theater director with his own company, but "an odd-jobber" in a "podunk town" whose marital state - taking a break but discovering adultery - is harsher, rougher and more confused, the spareness underlined by use of Academy Ratio imagery - with a layered "brooding mechanical droning" instead of a conventional score, and with a rough event coming to surprise the viewer. A " lean, bruising exploration of the minefield of an imperiled marriage," writes Rooney.

TIME (Garrett Bradley) uses new footage and video diaries to reconstruct a Louisiana woman's "tireless 20-year struggle" to gain the release of her husband from prison. She is raising six children while her husband serves a 60-year sentence in Louisiana State Penitentiary, Sheri Linden of HOLLYWOOD REPORTER explains. Mother and wife Fox Rich has become a powerful voice of change in her community and kept a video diary. "Time details her struggle," says Alissa Wilkinson in VOX, "demonstrating how mass incarceration persistently separates black families in America," and also "how bureaucracy and centuries of narratives conceal the truth and pain of those separations,"

NOTE: seven HOLLYWOOD REPORTER critics combined to choose their 20 best films of Sundance -and again there are some titles not covered on this thread. But ones that come up repeatedly we have now covered here. . .

[Chris Knipp]

Hollywood Reporter's still longer Best List. Some new titles.


THE 40-YEAR-OLD VERSION

NOTE: seven HOLLYWOOD REPORTER critics combined to choose their 20 favorite films of 2020 Sundance -and again there are some (seven) titles we'd overlooked here. They are all documentaries or documentary-fiction hybrids.

So here is their full list, with expanded comments from HOLLYWOOD REPORTER on the titles we missed:

THE 40-YEAR-OLD VERSION (Radna Blank) "Writer-director Radha Blank's coming-of-age-in-your-40s tale — about a burnt-out playwright (played by Blank herself) who turns to rap to get inspired again — is a love letter to the people of pre-gentrified Harlem, to old-school hip-hop, to struggling artists, to young folks with big dreams and to black women who dare to live outside the box. With carefully crafted visual language and a funny yet thought-provoking script, the film creates a world you want to soak up frame by frame.' — BEANDREA JULY

CRIP CAMP (Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht) their "stirring Netflix documentary about Camp Jened (an upstate N.Y. camp for children with disabilities, run by hippies), and the birth of the disability-rights movement at large, boasts smart focus, remarkable archival footage and inspiring subjects. Barack and Michelle Obama are among the executive producers, though this is a story that is truly non-partisan — humane, significant and told with impressive emotional heft." — DANIEL FIENBERG

DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD Ace documentary maker and cinematographer Kirsten Johnson (CAMERAPERSON) has crafted what might be called a playful, anticipatory filmed obituary of her very lovable aging, and ailing, father — including staged sequences that kill him off, then bring him back to life — who willingly goes along with the gag. Brilliantly original in every way, this Netflix venture is full of gallows humor, as well as deep mutual adoration between parent and child. — TODD MCCARTHY (She has worked on many more serious projects, including CITIZEN FOUR, about Edward Snowden.)

FALLING (Viggo Mortensen)
THE FATHER (Florian Zeller)

I CARRY YOU WITH ME (Heidi Ewing) Documentarian Heidi Ewing's ambitious narrative debut traces the decades-spanning, border-crossing romance between two Mexican men with almost Malickian impressionistic flair and a stealthily innovative mix of fictional and nonfictional elements. It's a poignant, urgently — though never stridently — political film that builds toward a hushed stunner of a conclusion. — JON FROSCH

INTO THE DEEP (Emma Sullivan). Sometimes journalists and documentary filmmakers stumble into circumstances that produce unforeseeably fascinating results, while occasionally they fall into disaster. Tragically, the latter was true for Swedish writer Kim Wall when Danish inventor Peter Madsen murdered her on his submarine, while the former is the case for Emma Sullivan, who has made this breathtaking account of the entire grievous affair. Netflix has a sensational work in this one, in both senses of the word. — T.M.

KAJILLIANAIRE (Miranda July)
THE KILLING OF TWO LOVERS (Robert Machoian)
MINARI (Isaac CHung)
NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS (Eliza Hittman)
ON THE RECORD (Kuirby DIck, Amy Zwerling)
PALM SPRINGS (Max Barbakow)
PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN (Emerald Fennell)


FROM THE REASON I JUMP

THE REASON I JUMP (Jerry Rothwell) Inspired by the book by Naoki Higashida, Jerry Rothwell’s elegant, luminous doc offers a glimpse into the way people "on the spectrum" see the world. Documenting the experience of five young people with autistic spectrum condition who either don't speak at all or don't use conventional language to communicate, this is nonfiction filmmaking at its most enlightening and ravishing to behold." — LESLIE FELPERIN (Felpererin as I recall from her discussion of the TV series "Atypical" has a child on the spectrum, and her high praise carries personal weight.

TIME (Garrett Bradley)
THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS (Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw)

WELCOME TO CHECHNYA (David France) is an HBO documentary from David France of HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE -(Filmleaf ND/NF 2012) that is (says HOLLYWOOD REPORTER'S David Rooney) "a searing probe into the government-directed persecution and killing of LGBTQ citizens from the Russian republic," one that chronicles "selfless work of rescue activists." It is "hard-hitting, emotionally charged and frequently distressing in its first-person accounts of detention and torture and its glimpses of vicious anti-gay violence caught on video," "an essential watch." (France's HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE is arguably the great AIDS documentary.)

ZOLA (Janicza Bravo)