‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’ Review: A Quintessential Dude With Attitude and Crush on Older Woman Sundance Film. That’s a Good and Not So Good Thing

Simu Liu subscribed to in order to land his breakthrough role in, admitting he «exaggerated» his martial arts skills because he so «badly» wanted the titular role.The 32-year-old actor became a global sensation after joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2021, but little did anyone know Liu «bluffed» his way into the role. During a discussion for 's «Actors on Actors» series, star Ariana DeBose said she admired Liu's dancing background (he was in a hip-hop competitive dance team in college) but admitted being taken aback by his sheer physicality in.

Alice Cooper shared his distaste for mixing music with politics in a new interview, explaining that he thinks “rock ‘n’ roll should be anti-political”.In the conversation with Creative Loafing Tampa Bay the shock rock legend was asked how his relationship with the controversial right-wing rocker, Ted Nugent is “holding up right now”.“Ted and I grew up together in Detroit, and he’s always been the mouth that roared. When he gets going, nobody can stay with him.

What do you have to say to the Russian people in the event of your death? Filmmaker Daniel Roher (“Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band,”) asks his subject, political Russian dissident, Alexei Navalny, at the beginning of his engrossing new doc “Navalny.” “C’mon,” Navalny scoffs, dismissively, as if highly attuned to Roher’s “gotcha” question he could frame posthumously in the case of the political agitator’s untimely death.

Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for U.S. Dramatic film at this year’s fest.

The deals keep coming at the 2022 Virtual Sundance Film Festival. MUBI closed the docu Free Chol Soo Lee, including North America, and Warner Bros is negotiating a near $7 million WW rights deal for the Tig Notaro/Stephanie Allynne film Am I Ok? to place the film on HBO Max. The Lauren Pomerantz-scripted film stars Dakota Johnson, Sonoya Mizuno, Jermaine Fowler, Molly Gordon, June Diane Raphael, and Sean Hayes.

picked up by AppleTV+ for $15 million and like 2020’s big Sundance seller “Palm Springs,” in a few months everybody will be watching — and adoring — it. Raiff plays Andrew, a 22-year-old recent college grad who lives with his mom (Leslie Mann) and stepdad (Brad Garrett) and still shares a bedroom with his little brother David (Evan Assante). A regular New Jersey Peter Pan. Charismatic Andrew has no life prospects and is working at a fast food joint called Meat Sticks when some local mothers realize he’d be great at livening up bar mitzvahs — getting kids on the dance floor, telling jokes and, on occasion, flirting with the parents.At one party he’s running, Andrew convinces an autistic girl named Lola (Vanessa Burghardt) to dance with him and then starts chatting up her mom, Domino (Dakota Johnson).

The Sundance Film Festival was decidedly a virtual affair this year, but that didn’t stop the joy from the filmmakers, actors, and artists who were honored at the annual awards ceremony. The big winners this year included “Nanny,” “The Exiles,” “Cha Cha Smooth” and “Navalny,” which took two Audience Awards.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticThe virtual Sundance Film Festival concluded with a virtual awards show — no host this year, just a series of statements and videos parceled out across two hours by Twitter. It was a strangely anti-climactic way of wrapping a low-key festival, while giving winners a chance to prep polite, crew-inclusive acceptance speeches.Among the audience prizes, U.S.

which first reported the sale, it was worth close to $15 million. Endeavor Content brokered the sale. Raiff stars as a recent college graduate living at home who becomes involved with a single mother while figuring his life out.

Apple has closed the biggest deal of the 2022 Virtual Sundance Film Festival, securing worldwide rights to the Cooper Raiff-directed Cha Cha Real Smooth for around $15 million. The streamer has been the front runner for the picture since it premiered January 23 in the US Dramatic Competition category.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film WriterCooper Raiff’s “Cha Cha Real Smooth” is officially dancing to Apple TV Plus. The tech giant and growing streamer has nabbed the second feature from the heat-seeking director out of this year’s virtual edition of the Sundance Film Festival.Apple emerged victorious from a competitive bidding market that had attracted Netflix, Amazon and Sony Pictures as potential buyers.The deal was brokered by Endeavor Content with a sale closing as high as $15 million, an individual familiar with the talks stated.“Cha Cha Real Smooth” stars Raiff as a recent graduate working as a bar mitzvah hype man.

At first glance, actor-writer-director Cooper Raiff’s “Cha Cha Real Smooth” might look like your typical cutesy and whimsical Sundance dramedy, about a twenty-something college graduate learning a valuable life lesson and experiencing a bit of a delayed coming of age. While that’s not an inaccurate description of Raiff’s disarmingly lovely film (programmed in this year’s US Dramatic Competition), what feels miraculous about “Cha Cha” is: it doesn’t come with even an ounce of that cringe-inducing Sundance fancifulness, a brand that many love to hate.

As you’ve hopefully heard by now, and read our review, the Sundance film, “Something In The Dirt” is a big hit. From filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who I like to describe as DIY versions of Christopher Nolan—that is to say ambitious, cerebral, complex sci-fi, horror, and genre films, but done on a lo-fi scale—“Something In The Dirt” is a swirl of all their previous heady, high-concept ideas, but with a big dose of humor and a deep look at the world of phenomenon, conspiracy theories and even pareidolia or apophenia (essentially the phenomenon of seeing patterns, consistencies and correlations of things that just aren’t there).

In 2020, the SXSW Film Festival was taken by storm by 23-year-old wunderkind filmmaker Cooper Raiff, who starred in, wrote, and directed “S#!%house,” a disarmingly funny and tender coming-of-age story about the connection that develops between a sensitive, lonely freshman, homesick and struggling at college, and a slightly-older sophomore that attends his school (that film bore shades of Richard Linklater indie-flavored meet-cutes). Having won the top prize at SXSW that year, Raiff now returns with “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” an endlessly charming, equally sensitive, bittersweet follow-up that proves he’s no one-hit-wonder.

With a promising start with his first film Shithouse for which he starred, directed and wrote and won the Grand Jury Narrative Prize at SXSW, Cooper Raiff looms now also to be one of the breakouts of this year’s Sundance Film Festival where Cha Cha Real Smooth, his small but splendid second film for which he performs the same triple threat duties debuted Sunday as part of the Dramatic Competition lineup. I can only imagine if the festival had managed to be in person as originally planned rather than virtual in this Omicron-stricken year it would be met with a massive standing ovation. Raiff is bound to become an indie darling as if further proof was needed, but Cha Cha Real Smooth cements him as the real deal both in front of and behind the camera.

EXCLUSIVE: Cooper Raiff can’t seem to catch a break from Covid. A hyphenate who comes into Sundance with one of the buzziest acquisitions titles in Cha Cha Real Smooth, Raiff is coming off the debut Shithouse — it’s more thoughtful than it sounds — that won the Grand Jury Prize at 2020 SXSW. Unfortunately, it was also the first major festival forced to cancel in-person events by Austin when Covid exploded. Raiff has made another charming confused young man comes of age film that he wrote, directed, produced and starred in. And now has run smack into Covid Delta’s sequel, Omicron. Which means he’ll keep intact his festival streak of being unable to experience his film playing in a crowded theater, a disadvantage since he makes crowd-pleasing films. The film, which stars Raiff, Dakota Johnson, Leslie Mann, Brad Garrett, Vanessa Burghardt and Evan Assante, makes its virtual Sundance debut tomorrow. The hope is that by the time the film gets released, Raiff’s work can be discovered in a theater. “Cooper’s magic is that his vision remained consistent, only deeper because of his interactions with the actors,” said producer Erik Feig, whose Picturehouse co-financed the film with Endeavor Content. “Cooper is a true humanist fully of empathy that is infused in every frame of this film.”

Even the title of W. Kamau Bell’s “We Need to Talk About Cosby” is loaded – because when we talk about Bill Cosby, we’re not just talking about Bill Cosby.