Sundance
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Sundance 2018: Never Goin’ Back review
★★★☆☆ Fresh faces Maia Mitchell and Cami Morrone star in the debut feature film from Texan director Augustine Frizzell, the chaotic, stoner-girl trip Never Goin’ Back – playing this weekend at Sundance London. High-school dropouts Jessie (Morrone) and Angela (Mitchell) are inseparable. Nothing matters more to them than each other as they move from day-to-day,…
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Sundance 2016: Love & Friendship review
★★★★☆ Whit Stillman’s films are often concerned with the absurdities of human interactions. His latest, Love & Friendship, is no different – except that it’s based on a Jane Austen novella. Yet Stillman, whose previous work like 2009’s Damsels in Distress focuses in a skew-eyed perspective of modern America, is the perfect fit. Based on…
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Sundance 2016: How to Let Go of the World review
★★☆☆☆ At the beginning of Josh Fox’s breakout 2010 documentary Gasland, he stated that he was not a pessimist. Further along the same road of ecological activism that he embarked on in that film, his newest endeavour sees him presented with a very real challenge to his otherwise sunny disposition. Even before it’s started, How…
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Sundance 2016: Programme preview
The sleepy Utah ski resort of Park City explodes into life once again as Hollywood and the world’s press bombard its slopes. This is the Sundance Film Festival, which despite its modest indie circuit origins (as the Utah/US Film Festival in 1978) is now America’s foremost film festival, perhaps in industry clout only behind Cannes…
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Sundance 2014: The One I Love review
★★★★☆ When Mark Duplass and Mad Men star Elisabeth Moss first sit and discuss their relationship in a couples therapy session, audiences will feel they have a fair idea of where The One I Love (2014) is headed. A romantic dramedy of sorts with hints of mumblecore, in which the aforementioned duo bicker before adorably…
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Sundance 2014: Obvious Child review
★★★★☆ Recent lo-fi Brooklynite comedies such as Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2013) and Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture (2010) feel positively old-hat compared with Gillian Robespierre’s bracing Obvious Child (2014), which is funnier and more urgent than both. Robespierre and her breakout star Jenny Slate give us a feminist comedy about abortion, but still this is…
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Sundance 2014: Memphis review
★★★☆☆ To describe Tim Sutton’s Memphis (2013) – screening this week at the Sundance London film and music festival – as ‘meditative’ would be something of an understatement. With his 2012 debut, Pavilion, the director was likened to a cross between Terrence Malick and Gus Van Sant, producing an ephemeral riff on adolescence whilst blurring…
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Sundance 2014: Little Accidents review
★★★☆☆ Moral crises abound in Sara Colangelo’s brooding debut feature, Little Accidents (2014). A small mining community in the Appalachian Mountains is devastated by the deaths of ten of its workers when a mine collapses. After a few months, the sole survivor Amos Jenkins (Boyd Holbrook) returns from hospital to find himself in the middle…
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Sundance 2014: Kumiko review
★★★★☆ Following on from 2012’s Kid-Thing, a feverish tale about a destructive young girl operating freely beyond all tangible moral boundaries, the Zellner brothers returns with Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014). Perfectly pitched between lighthearted whimsy and all-out absurdity, the Zellners’ latest is a forlorn tale about our own obsession with storytelling and a deconstruction…
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Sundance 2014: Drunktown’s Finest review
★★☆☆☆ In 1990, Sydney Freeland’s home of Gallup, New Mexico was dubbed Drunktown, USA by a report on ABC’s 20/20 news programme. Decades later, Freeland has reclaimed the undesirable moniker for the name of her feature debut set in her hometown and the adjoining reservation. Drunktown’s Finest (2014) has been a seven-year labour of love…