Features
The most intriguing films I saw were premised upon an often performative return to the near or distant past to resolve pesky questions of home or relationships, which is to say, inevitably, questions of identity and inheritance.
A pleasing sense of ambient drift marked a number of the landscape-focused True/False features I saw, a welcome respite from the “story” and character-obsessed rigidity that hobbles the American commercial documentary industry.
Even in this capacity-reduced iteration, one sensed the anticipation of what felt like largely local crowds returning to the program, perhaps for the first time since 2020, at each sold-out Forum screening.
In the murky waters of documentary ethics, responsible filmmaking is not always a question of authorship, but of perspective. It is not just about who is behind the camera, but who is seen through its lens.
Bemoaning or simply acknowledging the metastasis of the “Sundance film” has an obvious tendency of obscuring the nonfiction and non-English narrative entries that premiere at the festival and aren’t likely to be sought out by viewers, especially virtual ones.
Viewers watching this year’s Sundance films are being asked to interrogate their ways of seeing, coming up against films that examine perspective by more thoroughly investigating the relationship between who’s behind the camera and what we see on screen.
Years in Review
Best Televisual Storytelling, Worst Therapy Session, Most Underrated Performance, Best Debut, Best Secret Weapon, Most Welcome Nonsense, the 7 Offenses of 2021, and a special section on 2021 Music Doc Madness
One of Bugs Bunny’s greatest attributes is that he transcends the rational to become one of Hollywood entertainment’s greatest anti-establishment heroes.
Years in Review
Memoria, Drive My Car, The Souvenir Part II, The Power of the Dog, Annette, West Side Story, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, El Planeta
A mysterious fascination keeps one watching as On Cinema chugs along, playing out like a never-ending purgatory of what in most universes would have been a short curiosity sketch.
Its creative interactivity distinguishes TikTok from image-based social networks like Instagram, and also explains its dominance as a short-form video app, a larger trend in China.
A Few Great Pumpkins
Ghost Story of Yotsuya, Lord Shango, Malignant, Dracula, Carnival of Souls, Silent Night Deadly Night 3, When a Stranger Calls
Transgression was the key to their sonic palette, driven by the collision of Cale’s sustained minimalism with Reed’s earthy lyricism on pain and desire.
The crime remains so notorious in the town that, at one point, a longtime neighbor who resides by the now-shuttered family grocery refuses to discuss it with the director or even appear on camera.