‘Dual’ Review: Riley Stearns’ Dark, Deadpan Doppelgänger Comedy Is A Misjudged Odd Duck [Sundance]

TikTok is an undeniable force in our society. It has the power to launch music careers, house the homeless, and unite people worldwide.

The crushing weight of debt and the stress of financial struggle have led many to find creative problem-solving methods. The Sundance crime drama “Emily The Criminal” explores one such story about a character pressed to the limits by a system intent on keeping her in the loop of student debt and marginalized job opportunities.

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).

Filmmaker Jamie Dack is no stranger to film festivals. Her short film about teenage malaise in suburban Southern California “Palm Trees and Power Lines” premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival as a Cinéfondatio selection.

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.

Every so often, the movies like to argue with themselves by dropping two versions of the same story within spitting distance of one another: “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano,” “Deep Impact,” and “Armageddon.” The one-two punch of Sean Baker’s “Red Rocket” and Jamie Dack’s “Palm Trees and Power Lines” is, for clarity’s sake, nothing like dueling dumb-dumb disaster spectacles, but to consider Dack’s film without considering Baker’s is both impossible – everyone at Sundance is doing it– and frankly careless (but mostly impossible).

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.

“Have you ever felt vertigo looking into the sky?” Nadeem Shahzad asks over voiceover roughly fifteen minutes into “All That Breathes.” The accompanying shot looks straight up into a sunny yet smog-streaked sky as a swirl of black kites swoops and careens overhead. The birds are numerous, too many to count, but their movements are mesmerizing.

Hiding underwater to escape her vicious aggressors, a rush of terror washes over Sara (Laura Galán), a large-bodied teenager target of incessant insults, and worse, about her weight. The callousness of the bullying perpetrated against her one summery afternoon won’t go unpunished but will place the victim in a conundrum fluctuating between guilt and a warranted desire for retribution.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaRLJE Films, a business unit of AMC Networks, has taken all U.S. rights to “Dual,” a sci-fi film about cloning with Karen Gillan and Aaron Paul, in a low to mid seven figure deal. XYZ Films, CAA Media Finance and UTA Independent Film Group closed the deal with RLJE Films last night in a competitive bidding situation following the film’s Sundance premiere.

“Dual,” the latest film from director Riley Stearns that stars Karen Gillan and Aaron Paul, has sold its U.S. rights to RLJE Films, a division of AMC Networks, for a deal that landed in the low to mid 7-figure range.

“Have you ever felt vertigo looking into the sky?” Nadeem Shahzad asks over voiceover roughly fifteen minutes into “All That Breathes.” The accompanying shot looks straight up into a sunny yet smog-streaked sky as a swirl of black kites swoops and careens overhead. The birds are numerous, too many to count, but their movements are mesmerizing.

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.

“Bless your heart,” a former congregant says to Trinitie Childs (Regina Hall), the first lady of the Atlanta-based Baptist megachurch Wander To Greater Paths. As the film crew that’s been following the first lady for weeks looks on, Childs’ immediate reaction, Hall has always been a killer emotive actor, is to hold back the flurry of insults swirling underneath her polite grimace-smile.

There is, at the moment, no shortage of information in the culture about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. In just the past few months, the performers behind “I Love Lucy” have been the subjects of both a (very good) season of TCM’s “The Plot Thickens” podcast and a (very bad) Aaron Sorkin movie, “Being the Ricardos.” Now you can add to that mix “Lucy and Desi,” a new feature-length bio-documentary from actor/director Amy Poehler, which is hitting Amazon Prime in March, presumably as something of a companion piece to “Ricardos” (which the streamer/studio also financed).

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.

Society teaches you to be polite. If someone offers you an oatmeal cookie, for example, you’re probably going to say, “Thank you,” and take it, even if you really dislike those chalky, unsatisfying discs.

I always see the nannies when I take my kids to the park. They’re hard to miss, over there on the park benches with the strollers and bags of snacks, gossiping and swapping war stories and strategies and shouting out admonishments to the cherubs they’re there to supervise.