‘A Little Prayer’ Review: David Strathairn and Jane Levy Shine In Angus MacLachlan’s Throwback Family Dramedy

It’s crazy to think that boyish-looking Jonathan Tucker, known for roles in “The Virgin Suicides” (1999), “Hostage” (2005), “In the Valley of Elah” (2007), and “The Ruins” (2008), is now 40 years old. And beyond roles like “Charlie’s Angels” (2019), the perennially youthful-looking actor generally plays nice guys, introverts, and the like.

The avant-garde video artist Nam June Paik gets his own adulatory portrait in Amanda Kim’s documentary “Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV.” An act of biographical recovery that also, somehow, flattens a controversial artist, Kim’s film provides just enough contextual information to maintain interest, even if it’s never as radical as its titular subject.  READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated Films At The Sundance Film Festival Moving succinctly from birth to death, Kim provides a broad overview of Paik’s history and aesthetic interests.

Caught somewhere between a movie and a series, “Willie Nelson & Family” doubles down on the history and mythology of its namesake to stretch the latter into what would have been better served as the former.  Honest, introspective, yet rarely revelatory, the anthology often mistakes the comprehensive for the essential, and while it succeeds in explaining Willie Nelson to its audience, that’s about all it does.

In writer/director A.V. Rockwell’s feature directorial debut, “A Thousand and One,” Inez (a deeply felt Teyana Talyor) has returned to Harlem after spending a year in Rikers Prison.

This is “a place of mountains and myths,” we’re told as a montage of Central Appalachian imagery fills the frame. The mists, buffalo, ferns, and flowing waters intercut with the coal-filled mountains and mining towns that grew up around them.

There is no shortage of stories about fathers and their kids, specifically sons. But in Justin Chon’s (“Gook,” “Ms.

“Scrapper” starts in a dreary English flat with a child all alone but not incapable. That seems to be the M.O.

There are very few directors who like to work at the break-neck speed that Canadian multi-hyphenate Xavier Dolan relishes. Fewer still can boast of churning out quality output at every turn.

Few writers have as much of a hold on adults’ childhood selves as Judy Blume. Even if you’ve never read her books, her impact, especially with her most influential novels decades ago, is felt in how YA fiction is laid out today.

After growing up on a steady diet of “Law & Order: SVU,” Dianey Bermeo wanted to be like Olivia Benson, helping victims of sex crimes by bringing their assailants to justice. She gave up on that dream after police investigators in her college town failed to find the man who she said impersonated an officer and sexually assaulted her.

Angus MacLachlan wrote 2005’s terrific indie Junebug, which put Amy Adams on the big-time map and earned her a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination in a heartbreaking performance. It also put MacLachlan on the map with his first screenplay, and it was an auspicious start. Since then he has added directing to his credits including Goodbye to All and Abundant Acreage Available but tonight returned to the Sundance Film Festival with his latest, A Little Prayer, shot and set in his hometown of Winston-Salem, NC.

Like most teenagers, Heather (non-binary actor Bobbi Salvör Menuez), a social misfit who lives in a rural town in northern Canada, has a strict midnight curfew to adhere to. But unlike other teenagers, staying out for longer has a much more dangerous effect on her.

Ria Khan (Priya Kansara, sparkling in her feature debut) likes to believe that she’s no ordinary British-Pakistani teenager. Her dreams, for instance, always seem outsized — she doesn’t just want to learn martial arts but rather perfect it so well that she can become a world-class professional stunt woman.

The "Once" and "Sing Street" filmmaker is back with another testimonial to the transformative power of popular music.

There’s a popular song in North Korea called “Nothing to Envy.” Lines include, “Who can ever break our strength? / We are not afraid of any storm or stress” and “Our home is the bosom of the Party / We are all brothers and sisters / We envy nothing in the world.” Though they lack running water, indoor plumbing, and basic freedom of thought — to name just a few things — North Koreans are taught to believe that they genuinely have it better than any other country on earth.

Spanning three time periods and two continents, “Past Lives,” the directorial debut of Celine Song (“Endlings”), tells the story of two childhood friends and sweethearts pulled apart by time, circumstance, and fate. They come back together and end in a way that might subvert the romantic fantasies of the audience — but this only shows the important roles people play in our lives, even if it’s not what we expected.  READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated Films At The Sundance Film Festival Disembodied voices start us off in “Past Lives,” making guesses at who Nora (Greta Lee), Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), and Arthur (John Magaro) are to each other as they sit at an NYC bar.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Alice Englert’s “Bad Behaviour” is a dirty bomb of a movie, and it almost seems intentionally devised to keep the viewer off-balance. What at first appears a rather obvious send-up of self-help culture turns into a take-no-prisoners assault on narrative expectations and norms, all the while painting a pointed portrait of a truly complicated protagonist, the kind of character whose motivations and intentions are so slippery, you can barely make up your mind about her before she gives you a reason to change it again.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Alice Englert’s “Bad Behaviour” is a dirty bomb of a movie, and it almost seems intentionally devised to keep the viewer off-balance. What at first appears a rather obvious send-up of self-help culture turns into a take-no-prisoners assault on narrative expectations and norms, all the while painting a pointed portrait of a truly complicated protagonist, the kind of character whose motivations and intentions are so slippery, you can barely make up your mind about her before she gives you a reason to change it again.

The thorny, complicated history between the United States and Iran is infinitely more complex for those of the Persian diaspora living in America. It’s this nuanced tension trickling down to identity — between being too much this and not enough that in either homeland — that writer-director-producer Maryam Keshavarz (“Circumstance”) explores in her third film, “The Persian Version,” a decades and generation-spanning dramedy.