‘Judas And The Black Messiah’ To Premiere At The Sundance Film Festival

For most teens, the scariest hurdle they’ll face is asking their crush out on a first date. But on this night, for the bashful Mike (Tyson Brown), preparing for his first outing with the headstrong Kelsey (Shelby Duclos), courting is the least of his issues.

Literally opening, as the title implies, with “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet,” Argentinian director Ana Katz’s melancholic rumination on the life of Sebastian (Daniel Katz, the filmmaker’s brother), a languishing writer turned migrant worker, is a visually stunning, but oftentimes opaque experiment. Filmed in lush black and white, with animated interludes used to portray the more devastating aspects of Sebastian’s life, Katz’s film unfurls as a series of vignettes.

Abuse leaves scars unseen but permanent in director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s debut “Wild Indian,” a character study wrapped in larger observations on the generational effects of violence and religious guilt. In it, two men marked by a single crime lead distinctively dysfunctional lives.

In the aftermath of unprecedented change, it’s anyone’s guess where the planet will be by the conclusion of the 2020s. As the globe shifts into the second year of the oncoming decade, questions regarding the future of the species have arisen, specifically concerning the ever-increasing relationship between humanity and technology.

With her frayed blonde hair and moody coal-black eye makeup, rock band singer Marian (Alessandra Messa) doesn’t immediately appear to resemble her identical twin sister. Practically a Stepford wife with her demure manner and neat brown bob, Vivian (Ani Messa) lives with her loser husband (Jake Hoffman) in the same house the sisters grew up in.

Hauling two packages home under both arms, Leonor’s (Amalia Ulman) mother María (Ale Ulman) bursts through the door of their small apartment, proclaiming she will never return Amazon purchases for her again. Her daughter isn’t home.

To call a portrait documentary an “affectionate tribute” to its lesser-known subject, is usually redundant. That’s the whole point of adoring acknowledgment docs of this ilk— “shining a brighter spotlight” on [insert criminally undervalued subject here].

You are being watched. In the era of facial recognition, targeted advertising, and social media, the threat of an omnipresent eye on the average human has passed.

Something like a documentary “Inception” with a story inside of a tale that is itself part of a narrative, “Misha and the Wolves” boasts several layers, all of them fascinating. Concerned with notions of legacy, trauma, memory, and deceit, the documentary by director Sam Hobkinson juggles multiple stories, people, and time periods with seeming ease, weaving a fascinating, multi-faceted tale in a tight 85 minutes.

“Prime Time,” initially, opens with a beguiling premise. It’s New Year’s Eve in Poland, and the world is mere hours from the year 2000, a new millennium.

Rodney Ascher’s computer-haunted documentary “A Glitch in the Matrix” is not the most insightful recent examination of boredom-born foggy Internet delusions. That honor likely goes to Arthur Jones’ antic “Feels Good Man.” Still, Ascher’s appropriately discombobulating stew of queasiness, comedy, and terror seems well-cued to the subject matter, even while missing a certain editorial sharpness that might have brought some of its notions into greater clarity.

After a renowned career of nearly four decades in both film and TV, actor Robin Wright makes a confident feature directorial debut with “Land,” screening this year as part of Sundance Film Festival’s Premieres line-up.

Sean Ellis’ “Eight for Silver” is one of those movies that starts off so well, that shows such promise, that its slow unraveling feels less like a disappointment than a betrayal. It’s a Gothic horror picture that seems to set itself up as ambitious and intelligent, only to succumb to the most tiresome tropes and lazy shortcuts of the genre’s lesser efforts.

Irene (Tessa Thompson) rarely passes for white. She fears for her safety too much to do so.

It’s hard to say if the excoriating debut film written, produced, and directed by Fran Kranz, in being an extraordinarily depressing chamber piece dealing with the long-after fallout of a school shooting, is the last film we should have expected from the wacky “Dollhouse,” and “Cabin in the Woods” alum, or exactly the film he was always going to make, setting out his stall as a filmmaker of serious intent, to be taken seriously.

Marion Hill’s “Ma Belle, My Beauty” opens with the kind of aural ecstasy you’d expect from a romantic drama set in the South of France: a lazily looping guitar accompanying a breathy, enchanting vocal. The scene is set – and then it immediately collapses, as the vocalist tells her accompanist, “I hate this song, I’m sorry,” and escapes their rehearsal to take a bath.

Something like a documentary “Inception” with a story inside of a tale that is itself part of a narrative, “Misha and the Wolves” boasts several layers, all of them fascinating. Concerned with notions of legacy, trauma, memory, and deceit, the documentary by director Sam Hobkinson juggles multiple stories, people, and time periods with seeming ease, weaving a fascinating, multi-faceted tale in a tight 85 minutes.

When a person watches a movie as terrible as “Mother Schmuckers,” the natural thing is to examine the seams to see if this awfulness was indeed the point. The movies that turn into this skid almost always fail because there’s no way to capture the earnest magic that resides in the “so-bad-it’s-good” cannon, much in the same way that one can either see Shoeless Joe Jackson in an Iowa cornfield, or they can’t.

For some, Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein’s “How It Ends” may trigger a bit of PTSD back to the early months of the coronavirus pandemic when stay-at-home orders were in effect. The film was shot in June of 2020.

What does one even make of Ben Wheatley, at this point? That the same director is responsible for films as wildly divergent as “Sightseers,” “A Field in England,” “Free Fire,” “Happy New Year, Colin Burstead,” and last year’s “Rebecca” remake should be impressive – the variations present, in genre and tone, indicated a good old-fashioned journeyman director, and three cheers for that.