Sundance Film Festival Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

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.

debuted at Sundance this week, unravels Lee’s bizarre story with actor Alan Cumming sitting in for the man himself by lip-syncing to Lee’s narration (Lee agreed to tell his story, but didn’t want to appear on camera). Director Jono McLeod, who knew Lee as a fellow student, tells the tale via interviews with his now-50-something classmates, animated sequences and snippets of old video. Cumming, who was originally attached to star in a now-defunct feature adaptation of the story, remembers the saga as a news bombshell in Scotland.

Premiering in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at this year’s all-virtual Sundance Film Festival, Nikyatu Jusu’s unsettling “Nanny” is a supernatural thriller that weaves together strands of domestic drama and West African folklore.

“We grew up in Atlanta and in the church. Like in the height of Southern Baptist megachurches.

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.

W. Kamau Bell's docuseries, , has many people talking after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival over the weekend, including the subject of the four-part project.Bell serves as the narrator and co-executive producer for the docuseries that explores the life, career and impact of Bill Cosby, as well as how his sexual assault allegations forever changed his legacy. The series examines the rise of Cosby from comedian to «America's Dad,» and asks if it's possible to separate the art from the artist, especially when weighing his legacy against the 50+ sexual assaults he's alleged to have perpetrated during his career.«Mr.

“If we break any human being open, they contain worlds; they contain galaxies, and we’re often not as curious or interested in the people all around us.” Video essayist turned filmmaker Kogonada’s remarkable feature debut “Columbus” was about the meeting of two worlds invisibly occupying the same space. The film almost feels out of time, or that itself time stops, every time its lead characters find meaning and solace in one another.

poisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday. Called “Navalny,” it’s a no-holds-barred indictment of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, and insists that Navalny’s close brush with death was the result of a secret state-run operation to assassinate him.“As I became more and more famous guy, I was totally sure that my life became safer and safer because I am kind of famous guy — and it will be problematic for them just to kill me,” Navalny, 45, says in the film. “I was very wrong.” The doc, heading to HBO Max, was added at the last minute to the Sundance slate just as Putin had stationed more than 100,000 troops along the Ukrainian border.

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).

Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead go way down the rabbit hole in their new film, “Something In The Dirt,” one of the big standout films from the Sundance Film Festival. A pandemic brainchild of necessity—what can we shoot during the pandemic which is relatively inexpensive but still doable, so we don’t lose our marbles and can stay artistic—“Something In The Dirt” is a trippy, DIY, sci-fi-ish film about a pair of loser (played by the two filmmakers themselves) dudes in dystopic Los Angeles who stumble upon the unexplainable.

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.

The 2022 Sundance Film Festival obviously has so much to offer. Big premieres from indie auteurs, world cinema, documentaries, films for kids, and movies that are receiving so much acclaim right now, you’ll be hearing more from them later in the year upon regular theatrical release.

“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 the early moments of Carey Williams’ “Emergency,” you might think that you’re in a one crazy night movie you’ve seen before. You know the kind: a long night of partying and various drunken confrontations between friends, concluded with a serene moral and emotional parting where everywhere grows up a little.

In May 1948, after the controversial approval of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, war broke out between Arab and Jewish factions in the region. The conflict began due to claims over the same land.

Things have not been going well for Emily. Some of it is just terrible luck.

Addie Morfoot ContributorThis year at the Sundance Film Festival, three feature documentaries — Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s “Aftershock,” Reid Davenport’s “I Didn’t See You There” and Isabel Castro’s “Mija” — share in common a $10,000 grant provided by the Points North Institute and CNN Films’ American Stories Documentary Fund.Launched in 2020, the fund underwritten by CNN has dispensed a total of $100,000 in grants to emerging U.S. filmmakers working on 10 documentary projects that highlight pivotal moments in America. Eiselt and Lewis Lee’s “Aftershock,” and Davenport’s “I Didn’t See You There” are two of nine films in the Sundance U.S.

in a post-screening Q&A, Dunham ran down its many high-minded inspirations. She said she wanted to “give porn its due as something that can be really healing.” And, as a woman who can’t have biological children due to a hysterectomy, Dunham, 35, wished to tell a story about “what it means to make your own family and design your own family and how that’s just as meaningful.” Yes, it is. But does that beautiful message come during the scene when the 26-year-old main character Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) scrawls an A-to-Z list of sex acts on colorful construction paper that she’d like to try out with randos? Or when her mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh) gives a vocab lesson on a crude nickname for the male anatomy? Sarah Jo’s sister Treina (Taylour Paige) is adopted, true, but the world is already in universal agreement that adoption is a great thing to do.

“There is no timeline to figuring this out,” Jane tells her best friend Lucy in Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne’s directorial debut feature film “AM I OK?” This is a film for late bloomers of any kind but will resonate particularly with anyone who came into their sexual identity later in life. Screenwriter Lauren Pomerantz (“Me, Myself and I”) took inspiration from her own late in life, coming out and close relationship with her best friend, producer Jessica Elbaum (“Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” “Hustlers”).

Bookended by a near-identical juxtaposition of sound and fury, directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom” starts and ends like a messy, wannabe Jules Dassin cityscape film seen through a grunge filter. “Manhattan crowds with their turbulent musical chorus, Manhattan faces, and eyes, forever for me,” our narrator reads as we see riotous anger take to the streets.

“I’d rather have one person dance in my car than have 100 people with the song on in the background” late-night radio DJ, Naz (Naz Kawakami), tells his friend. The young man hosts a show called “Night Drive,” on 90.1 FM Honolulu, “the show that makes you feel cool when you’re driving at night, the show where you actually are as you speed down the freeway going about your misdeeds.” Beginning production in November 2020 as a sort of documentary/fiction hybrid, native Hawaiian filmmaker Alika Tengan’s “Every Day In Kaimukī,” is an admirable and well-intended debut, though it’s far more successful in its vibe than it is in establishing an artistic voice with command over narrative.

As you’ve hopefully heard by now, and read our review, the Sundance film, “Something In The Dirt” is a big hit. From filmmakers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who I like to describe as DIY versions of Christopher Nolan—that is to say ambitious, cerebral, complex sci-fi, horror, and genre films, but done on a lo-fi scale—“Something In The Dirt” is a swirl of all their previous heady, high-concept ideas, but with a big dose of humor and a deep look at the world of phenomenon, conspiracy theories and even pareidolia or apophenia (essentially the phenomenon of seeing patterns, consistencies and correlations of things that just aren’t there).

Attempting to remake a classic film is never an easy assignment. Especially when said classic is as revered as Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 drama “Ikiru.” Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro could have placed the story in contemporary times, making a new version more palatable for some critics, but instead, set it in the exact same era only interchanging London for Tokyo.

accused her former fiancé Brian Warner — otherwise known as the controversial goth rocker Marilyn Manson — as her abuser for the first time.But as the now 34-year-old Wood claims in “Phoenix Rising,” a feature documentary whose first half premiered Sunday night at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, the signs had been apparent for years — and in at least one instance, viewed by nearly 30 million fans on YouTube.In the film, set to air in its entirety on HBO in March, Wood recalls her appearance in his 2007 music video for “Heart-Shaped Glasses,” which shows the couple having sex, or so it appears. While the song plays over these specific clips in the video, the documentary airs the sound of Wood, then 19, shouting in distress.“We had discussed a simulated sex scene,” Wood said.

Most of us who grew up pouring over the pages of many a yellowed comic book of the mid-20th century will likely recall any number of unusual ads gracing the back cover of “Spider-Man” or “Detective Comics”; such ads touted the promise of pills that guaranteed heightened strength, home hypnosis kits and, perhaps most legendary, inexpensive toys ranging from the likes of the mighty X-Ray Specs to the admittedly ridiculous sea monkey phenomenon that somehow remain a tiny part of the pop culture lexicon to this day.

Opening on a slide show in an empty classroom, a storm thundering away outside, black and white frontier images flicker. They feature carriages, trains, and indigenous persons communicating with settlers; miners, hunters, and cavalry troops: a romantic portrait of Manifest Destiny.

Muhammad bin Nayef Counseling and Care Center was founded by its namesake Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, as a pillar of Saudi Arabia’s new method for dealing with terrorism. Once released from Guantanamo Bay, prisoners — not unlike American convicts — tend to relapse back to their old, destructive behaviors.

Up until the 1960s, Black folks, tricked by sinister white folks, were entrapped into servitude because of debts that they owed. Southern whites took advantage of the climate of racism that dominated the area, and the inherent power dynamics such a system provided, to maintain a form of slavery over a century after its formal abolishment.

hits Hulu March 4, will more likely make you hurl than send you racing for a cold shower.The title doesn’t describe the movie very well. “Fresh” is a familiar and somewhat successful horror film in the socially conscious mold of “Get Out.” There are shocks and suspense. When the twist — which will not be revealed here — arrived, I let out a loud expletive.

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.

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.

“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.