‘Phoenix Rising’ Review: The Harrowing Resurrection Of Evan Rachel Wood Proves There’s Still So Much Work To Be Done [Sundance]

Directed by Paula Eislet and Tonya Lewis Lee (Spike Lee’s producer and partner), the documentary “Aftershock” chronicles the dismal maternal mortality rate that women of color face in the United States medical system. The statistics are shameful, pointing to a systemic racist indifference, and the documentary chronicles the staggering number of times that expectant mothers entering into hospitals simply do not come out alive due to a lack of care and sensitivity.

In 1973, at the age of 23, Korean immigrant Chol Soo Lee was arrested. An outsider within San Francisco’s Chinatown, Lee was charged with first-degree murder after being accused of shooting a Chinese gang member in the back at point-blank range.

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

A dreamlike exploration of toxic masculinity, new motherhood, and sexual awakening, Quebecois actor-director Monia Chokri debuted her second feature, “Babysitter,” at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. While it’s unclear what “Babysitter” is actually trying to say — or even what its characters learn over the course of its plot — the film is so thoroughly sardonic that it gleefully resists any deeper meaning.

“My Old School,” a documentary by Jono McLeod, opens with an enticing montage. Interviewees speak ominously about a mysterious character who’s done something strange — a man who may even be unhinged enough to have changed his identity through facial reconstruction.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Playing in the Premieres section of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Sharp Stick,” produced during lockdown, was conceived by Lena Dunham and the film’s director of photography, Ashley Connor, starting from the base elements that were already available to them — namely a set of actors and locations. But while many quarantine-made films have appeared to embrace a “will this do?” aesthetic, implicitly relying on the audience’s sympathy and compassionate understanding to fill gaps and forgive compromises in production value, Dunham has instead created a work of art that comfortably fits within and plays with the limitations imposed by the pandemic.

A blistering psychological thriller and enigmatic horror film that already has Sundance audiences divided thanks to its provocative, polarizing premise, filmmaker Andrew Semans’ “Resurrection” is emotionally searing, wildly unhinged and maybe even a little batshit crazy. However, as anchored by its two fiercely committed and convincing lead performances (Rebecca Hall and Tim Roth), a menacingly disquieting tone, and a frightening ambiguity about a disintegrating mental state, “Resurrection” is a deeply distressing and compelling drama that will shock and shake you to your core.

American tourists spooked out by what they see on their visit to a European country will always be a valid premise for a film. The same goes for movies concerned with voyeurism, whether our protagonist is the one watching or the one being watched — though they usually are both, as is the case in Chloe Okuno’s “Watcher.” Playing in the U.S.

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.

Even the title of W. Kamau Bell’s “We Need to Talk About Cosby” is loaded – because when we talk about Bill Cosby, we’re not just talking about Bill Cosby.