‘A Glitch In The Matrix’ Trailer: Rodney Ascher’s Sundance Doc Tackles The Nature Of Reality

Matt Donnelly Senior Film WriterPlenty of Hollywood studio executives are sports fanatics — pre-pandemic, the floor seats at any given Lakers game often looked like the executive check-in at the Academy Awards.But Tom Rothman, chairman of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, has taken his love of the game to a much more philosophical level during a recent and rare sit-down interview.

Chris Willman Music WriterAhmir “Questlove” Thompson has announced his second feature film as a director quickly on the heels of winning both the grand jury and audience prizes at Sundance this month for his first documentary, “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).” He’ll return to that same era and musical milieu with a a documentary about Sly Stone, the frontman of Sly and the Family Stone, a group that appeared in 1969 footage used in “Summer of Soul.”“It goes

As Sly and the Family Stone’s 1971 tune says, it’s a family affair,

EXCLUSIVE: Greenwich Entertainment has acquired U.S. rights to Whirlybird from A&E IndieFilms. The doc, which premiered at last year’s Sundance, is the feature debut of Matt Yoka. It follows a husband-and-wife news helicopter team who covered some of Los Angeles’ most historic events.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticThe youth party culture, as portrayed in the mass media, tends to be driven by a certain debauched and glamorous energy: the clubbing, the drugs, the “freedom,” the your-life’s-a-soap-opera excitement that turns the rituals of hooking up into a flame that lures everyone.

her directing debut, however, is its soulfulness. Her character, Edee, isn’t some spoiled brat stranded in the woods like Tea Leoni in “Six Days Seven Nights”; she is a traumatized woman trying to rebuild her life from the ground up.Edee’s reality has been shattered by a family tragedy, so she packs up the car and leaves the city behind for a cabin deep in the Wyoming wilderness far removed from civilization.

A sun-flared and bong-addled tumble into a teenage Texan summer rife with bombshells and boyfriend problems, “Cusp,” from debut directors Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt is one of those fractal-style documentaries, in which any given sliver contains all the colors and contours of the whole.

Fran Kranz’s “Mass” is likely one of the most emotionally pulverizing films ever made about America’s gun-violence epidemic – but across its 110-minute runtime, not a single shot is fired.

It’s remarkably rare that anyone makes a hand-drawn animated feature for adults, let alone one as strikingly surreal and seriously minded as Dash Shaw’s “Cryptozoo.” READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated 2021 Sundance Film Festival Premieres This Sundance premiere – honored with the fest’s Innovator Award in its NEXT section for “pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling” – takes place in an alt-history 1960s secretly populated by “cryptids,” including

National Geographic Documentary Films said Tuesday that it has acquired Playing with Sharks, the feature documentary about Australian icon, conservationist and filmmaker Valerie Taylor that had its world premiere last week at the Sundance Film Festival. The pic is written and directed by Sally Aitken and is produced by WildBear Entertainment and Dogwoof. No release date plans or deal details were announced.

13-year-old Sammy Ko (Miya Cech) is a problem child. Prone to skipping class, smoking cigarettes, and mouthing off to her teachers, she’s the opposite of the meek model student Hollywood typically imagines when writing young Asian-American characters.

Questlove responded with incredulous disbelief when he was first told about the footage.

After three feature documentaries, Rodney Ascher has certainly found his niche. In his The Shining-themed Room 237,The Nightmare, about those afflicted with sleep paralysis, and his new A Glitch in the Matrix, he eagerly pushes nonfiction conventions right up to the border of identification with sometimes disturbed interviewees, exploring ideas that burrow into their heads and can wreck or at least transform their lives.

Literally opening, as the title implies, with “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet,” Argentinian director Ana Katz’s melancholic rumination on the life of Sebastian (Daniel Katz, the filmmaker’s brother), a languishing writer turned migrant worker, is a visually stunning, but oftentimes opaque experiment. Filmed in lush black and white, with animated interludes used to portray the more devastating aspects of Sebastian’s life, Katz’s film unfurls as a series of vignettes.

With her frayed blonde hair and moody coal-black eye makeup, rock band singer Marian (Alessandra Messa) doesn’t immediately appear to resemble her identical twin sister. Practically a Stepford wife with her demure manner and neat brown bob, Vivian (Ani Messa) lives with her loser husband (Jake Hoffman) in the same house the sisters grew up in.

Rodney Ascher’s computer-haunted documentary “A Glitch in the Matrix” is not the most insightful recent examination of boredom-born foggy Internet delusions. That honor likely goes to Arthur Jones’ antic “Feels Good Man.” Still, Ascher’s appropriately discombobulating stew of queasiness, comedy, and terror seems well-cued to the subject matter, even while missing a certain editorial sharpness that might have brought some of its notions into greater clarity.

Also Read: Rodney Ascher's 'A Glitch in the Matrix' Acquired by Magnolia Ahead of Sundance PremiereAscher takes a similar approach, wandering through as many musings that’ll elicit a “What?” as much as a “Whoa.”Speaking of which, it may not surprise anyone to learn that Keanu Reeves is the icon of this ideology, just as “The Matrix” trilogy is its Bible.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaFilmmaker Maisie Crow was visiting a Texas high school to speak to students in a video production class about her career behind the camera when she saw something shocking. A group of teenagers were making their way through the hallways, SWAT team style, brandishing red plastic guns.“I was taken aback,” says Crow.

its ongoing lies and distortion and insisting that their official death toll is underreported by as much as tens of thousands.Called “In The Same Breath,” the HBO film begins hours after a massive New Year’s Eve celebration in Wuhan, China, a city of 11 million and the one-time epicenter of the pandemic.The next day, a slew of robotic news anchors recited a government script, meant to minimize the impending disaster.