‘Infinity Pool’ Review: Mia Goth & Alexander Skarsgård Terrify In Neon-Lit Nightmare [Sundance]

Just a couple of weeks ago, the folks at Sundance were startled by Brandon Cronenberg’s “Infinity Pool.” Not only is it another mind-bending feature from one of the most experimental, somewhat mainstream filmmakers working today, but he surprised everyone with an NC-17 cut of the film. This is a different version than what was just released this past weekend in theaters, which carried a more typical R rating.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the folks at Sundance were startled by Brandon Cronenberg’s “Infinity Pool.” Not only is it another mind-bending feature from one of the most experimental, somewhat mainstream filmmakers working today, but he surprised everyone with an NC-17 cut of the film. This is a different version than what was just released this past weekend in theaters, which carried a more typical R rating.

Neon and Topic Studios present writer/director Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool at 1,835 theaters in a lively specialty weekend sandwiched between a new crop of Sundance films and noteworthy expansions in the glow of Oscar nominations.

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.

Not yet thirty years old, Mia Goth has already collaborated with several world-renowned filmmakers for her willingness to follow their most demented muses. Her girlish appearance strikes a shocking contrast with the atrocity exhibitions that she gravitates toward: eagerly taking to sexual grooming in Lars Von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac;” undergoing forcible insemination and grisly spaghettification with Claire Denis in “High Life;” becoming an insane asylum’s incestuous princess for Gore Verbinski in “A Cure for Wellness;” witnessing her own disembowelment as part of the orgiastic blood ritual Luca Guadagnino that’s the grand finale to “Suspiria;” manifesting a century of madness for Ti West’s in-progress trio of period pieces of “X,” “Pearl,” and the upcoming “Maxxxine.” And so it’s no surprise that Goth’s latest outing is another twisted affair: Brandon Cronenberg‘s “Infinity Pool,” which takes place at a Mediterranean beach resort that hides a violent and depraved sub-culture.

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.

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.

The "Thoroughbreds" and "Bad Education" filmmaker's sci-fi/comedy finds him working on a larger canvas, but to lesser effect.

Brendon (Algee Smith) isn’t a bad kid. An aspiring artist living in Los Angeles, in his last month of high school, the pressures of his daily life, however, are beginning to overwhelm him.

Ira Sachs prefers relationships of the doomed variety — tempestuous passions torn asunder, sometimes by external forces like capitalism, which complicated the search for a home through New York’s cutthroat real estate market in “Love Is Strange” and “Little Men.” His latest film — the sexy, frustrating, loose-yet-compact, altogether irresistible three-hander “Passages” — also concerns property contracts and a homeless protagonist. However, this one’s got nobody but himself to blame for that predicament, fluent as he is in the same toxic strain of amour fou that previously perfumed the air in “Keep the Lights On” and especially Sachs’ debut, “The Delta.” As in that film — also pitched at the admirably humble quotidian scale Sachs hasn’t felt the need to exceed in more than a quarter decade — “Passages” follows a bisexual chaos agent so wrapped up in his own narcissism that he can’t see where his self-exploration ends and insensitivity to those around him begins.

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.

JG Ballard meets Ben Wheatley in Brandon Cronenberg’s latest. Which is a bit of a surprise, since the two have already met: in 2015, in the latter’s dystopian satire High-Rise. There are (literal) shades of Nicolas Winding Refn, too, and a healthy smattering of body horror inherited from the old man, whose filmography Cronenberg Jr. raids to make an unlikely fusion of Videodrome and A History of Violence, two very opposing milestones in his father’s career.

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.

There was a time when it seemed like every movie trailer for every single comedy began with bouncy music and a voice-over artist explaining cheerfully, “[NAME OF PROTAGONIST] had it all!” But at the beginning of Nicole Holofcener’s “You Hurt My Feelings,” Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) does, in fact, seem to have it all: she’s in a long-lasting marriage with a successful therapist, they have a great apartment on the Upper West Side, their 23-year-old son Eliot (Owen Teague) is writing his first play, she teaches writing at the New School, and she’s just finished her second book.