Tag Archives: sundance film festival

Sundance Film Festival: Real estate crash gets painfully real in “99 Homes”

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Ramin Bahrani has made a weird turn as a filmmaker. He started out making elliptical character studies like “Man Push Cart” and “Goodbye Solo.” Now he’s making social-issue dramas with recognizable Hollywood stars that aim to get a few bullet points across along with the drama.

2012’s “At Any Price” tried to show the crisis in modern farming, but was too unfocused and shrill, with dialogue that sounded like people shouting op-eds at each other. But “99 Homes,” which looks at the damage wreaked by the subprime mortgage crisis, is a big improvement.

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Sundance Film Festival: “Sleeping With Other People” doesn’t cheat on honesty or laughs

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Everybody’s talking about the bottle scene.

In a Sundance Film Festival where we’ve had a gymnastic sex scene (“The Bronze”) and a James Marsden-Jack Black coupling (“The D Train”), the raunchy scene that seems to be topping them all is in Leslye Headland’s “Sleeping With Other People.”

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Sundance Film Festival: “(T)ERROR” reveals the Keystone Kops of Kounterterrorism

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If the consequences weren’t so dire, the ham-fisted FBI “counterterrorism” operation chronicled in the documentary “(T)ERROR” would be comical. You could see the Coen Brothers taking a whack at this sort of material — an FBI informant and would-be cupcake chef with delusions of grandeur (he’s a big fan of “Homeland”) ensnares completely innocent Muslims in terrorism investigations. And lets a documentary crew follow him around for the whole thing.

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Sundance Film Festival: “The End of the Tour” treats David Foster Wallace with compassion and insight

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Jason Segel gets David Foster Wallace just right in James Ponsoldt’s “The End of the Tour.” He looks just like the big, shaggy, brilliant author of “Infinite Jest,” and he sounds just like him too, the mix of pithy insights, tangents of self-doubts, and moments of unshakable compassion towards the human condition all tumbling out.

He sounds like him. But he sounds like us, too.

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Sundance Film Festival: “What Happened, Miss Simone?” dives into the eye of Hurricane Nina

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There’s a double meaning inherent in the title of the documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?” which opened the 2015 Sundance Film Festival on Thursday night.
At face value, the question seems innocuous: “What things occurred?” But the undercurrent of the question, which was posed by Maya Angelou in a poem, is “What went so wrong?”

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Looking forward to the 2015 Sundance Film Festival

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Last January, at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, I was at the second screening ever of Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” which has gone on to top critics’ best-of lists, and, perhaps more surprisingly, be a serious contender at this year’s Oscars. I missed the festival’s opening-night film, “Whiplash,” which has also gone onto a lot of Oscar attention.

Also at that festival, I was one of about 100 people crammed into a room for a discussion on digital storytelling, which included the world premiere of a new show for the then-fledgling Amazon Prime Video. That show was “Transparent,” which went on to also top critics’ best-of lists and win Golden Globes last week for Best Comedy/Musical Show and Actor.

The idea that the Sundance Film Festival is a hothouse for precious indie films destined to wither away once they hit the cold cruel world of the marketplace doesn’t seem so valid anymore.

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“Sundance 2014 Live Action Shorts”: Short cuts from Park City

 

 

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“Sundance 2014 Live Action Shorts” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated, 1;39, three stars out of four.

The Oscar-nominated short film collections have been a popular annual tradition at Sundance Cinemas in February, and not just for audiences filling out their Oscar ballots who want an edge. The chance to see an eclectic mix of shorts is like a sampler platter — if you don’t like what you’re tasting, the next one’s coming soon.

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Wisconsin Film Festival Spotlight: “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter”

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The 2014 Wisconsin Film Festival schedule went live on Thursday, and each day between now and the start of the festival on April 3, I’ll be zooming in on one of the more than 140 films playing at the festival. If you have suggestions about films you’d like to know more about as you’re planning your festival experience, let me know in comments.

“Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter” (Sunday, April 6 at 8:30 p.m and Monday, April 7 at 8:30 p.m., Sundance)

Of all the films I saw at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the one that immediately leaped out at me as a perfect fit for our own Wisconsin Film Festival was — well, it was “Life Itself,” the Roger Ebert documentary. But the distributor seems to be keeping that one off the festival circuit in advance of a summer theatrical release.

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Sundance Film Festival: David Cross delivers a flurry of “Hits” to fame-obsessed culture

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“Hits,” “Mr. Show” co-creator David Cross’ first film as a writer-director, plays like a feature-length episode of “Mr. Show.” And that’s a good thing. “Mr. Show” mixed inspired silliness and vicious satire in equal measure, and “Hits” sustains that formula for 90 gloriously nasty minutes.

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