Kino Lorber Acquires Fernanda Valadez’s Debut Film ‘Identifying Features’ – Sundance

Chaka Khan has won 10 Grammy Awards over the course of her impressive career, and now the legendary singer will take the stage at one of the biggest basketball games of the season! The 66-year-old powerhouse will perform the American National Anthem at the 69th NBA All-Star Game on Feb. 16! She will be in good company, as Lil Wayne, DJ Khaled, and Quavo are among the other artists performing at the game held in Chicago.

Following her Oscar-nominated turn in “Bombshell,” Margot Robbie looks to have found her next project, signing on to co-star opposite Christian Bale in a new David O. Russell film at New Regency.

Iconic

Sixty years. That’s how long a Louisiana judge sentenced Rob Richardson to serve for armed bank robbery. Garrett Bradley covers more than a third of that term in “Time,” and the cumulative impact — boiled down into an open-minded and deeply empathetic 81 minutes — will almost certainly rewire how Americans think about the prison-industrial complex.

Every summer, more than 1,000 teens swarm the Texas capitol building to attend Boys State, the annual American Legion-sponsored leadership conference where these incipient politicians divide into rival parties, the Nationalists and the Federalists, and attempt to build a mock government from the ground up.

By Mike Fleming Jr

By Mike Fleming Jr

PARK CITY, Utah — What do “Reservoir Dogs,” “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Clerks” and “Wet Hot American Summer” all have in common? The Sundance Film Festival.

It took four movies before Lee Isaac Chung was ready to tell the kind of story first-timers so often rush to share straight out of the gate. Not a coming-of-age movie so much as a deeply personal and lovingly poetic rendering of his Korean American childhood — specifically, how it felt for his immigrant family to adjust to life in small-town Arkansas — “Minari” benefits from the maturity and perspective Chung brings to the project.

Sony Pictures Classics has teamed with Sony’s Stage 6 Films to oversee the global release of Heidi Ewing’s feature narrative debut “I Carry You With Me (Te Llevo Conmigo),” a gay love story about two men who immigrate to the United States. The deal follows the movie’s enthusiastic reception at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The romantic drama debuted to multiple standing ovations in Park City, where it was shown in the NEXT section. It will be released later this year.

Amid the snow-covered mountains of Park City, Utah – South African filmmakers, producers, and directors have made a strong representation this year at Sundance – the largest independent film festival in the US.

The best political documentary at Sundance this year does not star Hillary Clinton or AOC, but a bunch of 17-year-old dudes.

Amazon Studios has bought “Uncle Frank,” an acclaimed drama about a closeted gay man forced to come out to his Southern family in the 1970s. The film debuted this weekend at the Sundance Film Festival.

Pete (Will Ferrell) and Billie (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) are a prosperous American couple who’ve taken their two sons on a ski vacation to the Alps. Are they having fun yet? That’s a question that hovers over the movie, as the family members hit the slopes and make pilgrimages to the alpine-lodge restaurant, or retire to their room, where they always feel guilty about playing games or watching TV, since they could do that anywhere.

Addiction, you could say (and I would), has become the central demon that plagues Americans. We’re addicted to everything: alcohol, illegal drugs, pharmaceutical drugs, psychotropic drugs, sugar-bomb soft drinks, processed food, video screens…you name it.

One of the people who’s made long-form television drama arguably more interesting as a whole than its mainstream big-screen equivalent in recent years, Alan Ball has underlined his superior comfort with that format in the few theatrical features he’s made to date. His screenplay for “American Beauty,” which Sam Mendes directed, was brilliant but glib; as writer-director of 2007’s “Towelhead,” he couldn’t quite make the complicated agenda of Alicia Erian’s novel gel in two-hour form.

To the individual enduring it, sorrow seems a lonely, defenseless emotion, one from which others are too quick to look away. Shared and felt en masse, however, it can become something different: a galvanizing force, a wall, not diminished in pain but not diminished by it either.