‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’ Review: Cooper Raiff Gets The Party Started In His Super-Charming, Bittersweet Sophomore Drama [Sundance]

As everyone knows, there’s no such thing as free cable! Verizon teased fans of Jim Carrey‘s 1996 cult classic movie The Cable Guy ahead of Super Bowl LVI on Monday February 7. The 60-year-old comedic talent showed that he’d be taking on the role from the dark comedy classic in a teaser clip for the Super Bowl commercial a few days before the big game.

Dakota Johnson is in talks to join the Spider-Man universe!

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

If you’ve never been to Sundance before, you can expect a lot of fresh features from oft-marginalized directors and — at least these days — films shot with square aspect ratios. “Girl Picture,” a delightful, Finnish coming-of-age tale by the director Alli Haapasalo, fulfills both criteria.

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).

who died in September at age 54, is the best part of the new movie “892” — the “Wire” actor’s final film role.The edgy Williams is perfection as a crisis negotiator during a dangerous standoff. As his character Eli attempts to diffuse a hostage situation, he is measured, conversational and, most vitally, believable.

Suki Waterhouse seems to have made a rare mention about her ex Bradley Cooper.

It took Evan Rachel Wood years to muster the courage to name her abuser. A lot of people knew who he was, divorced from her, because of his job, his public persona, his notorious reputation — controversial, provocative, fundamentally harmful.

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.

If two people who lack a common language want to communicate, they’ll find a way to communicate. The characters in “blood,” the first new film from Bradley Rust Gray in a decade, don’t exactly lack a common language, but coltish English and crummy Japanese necessitate auxiliary tools for communication, such as food, dance, music, flowers, and art.

Equipped with a hazy aesthetic and archival footage galore, “Nothing Compares,” Kathryn Ferguson’s documentary about the early stardom of controversial singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor, celebrates the Irish artist’s commitment to shattering industry trends but ultimately fails to break away from traditionalism itself. “Nothing Compares” presents O’Connor as a pioneer, an artist whose foremost rationale for pursuing a career in music resided in her desire to craft art for the sake of social reform by way of personal catharsis.

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.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticHe’s a cha cha real smooth talker. He’s 22, tall and handsome with a beard, but not a scruffy hipster beard — more like a post-millennial, post-ironic traditional beard, which sets off features that are finely chiseled in a Middle American corporate way. (When he grins, he looks like Donny Osmond.) He’s just out of college but has no idea what he wants to do.

Sometimes you commit to a decision because it’s the one in your head, the one on the page, and it’s the north star you are aiming for. In filmmaker Riley Stearns‘ latest Sundance picture, the darkly comedic, intentionally strange, and off-kilter doppelgänger film, “Dual,” the intention is to be askew, left of center, and bizarrely funny.

Virgino and Sisa live what most people would consider a very simple life. They raise and care for Lamas in the Bolivian highlands keeping the traditions of their Quechua people alive.

Seemingly a rejection of monocausal history in that it twists the firehose nozzle all the way open to spray from any and every direction, “Riotsville, U.S.A.” is no less problematic from where it sits on the other side of that theoretical chasm. Grabbing at anything that conforms to the half-cooked epiphanies the documentary has from moment to moment, the path of the film’s discussion weaves through about a dozen provocative ideas without betraying much of an attempt to critically analyze any one of them.

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.