'Pleasure': Film Review | Sundance 2021

Being pressured to read a friend's extensive text conversation with their vexatious significant other is one of the scourges of modern life. As it happens, that comprises much of what's asked of the audience by R#J, the un-Googleable desktop film that adapts Romeo and Juliet for the Instagram age.

When Molly, the troubled but dogged protagonist of Knocking, moves into her new apartment, she notices the word "Help" scrawled high on the elevator wall. Whether this is a random bit of graffiti or a sign of a particular hyperawareness on Molly's part — a sensitivity to cries of anguish — goes to the heart of this smart, disquieting film.

More than 20 years ago, the Kosovo war with Serbia and Montenegro left 12,000 dead and more than 3,000 missing, mainly Kosovar Albanians. In Hive (Zgjoi), her first feature, writer-director Blerta Basholli is inspired by the true story of Fahrije Hoti, a single mother who, many years after her husband goes missing, is forced by economic necessity to face his loss.

The enormity of nature hits you like a freight train in the early scenes of James Ashcroft's taut and sinewy first feature, Coming Home in the Dark. The majestic rural landscape of Greater Wellington, on the southernmost tip of New Zealand's north island, changes in an instant from a place of enveloping tranquility to one of terrifying, helpless isolation as a family's encounter with a pair of murderous drifters uncovers past trauma.

Love triangles seem to occur more often in the movies than in real life — unless I’ve been hanging out in all the wrong places. They are a convenient choice for storytellers looking for a piquant, offbeat way to dress up the green-eyed monster.

Much of Erin Vassilopoulos’ moody, something’s-wrong-in-the-suburbs directorial debut, Superior, takes place in a Reagan-era Barbie Dreamhouse come to life. Within its mint and pink-punch walls live Vivian (Ani Mesa) and Michael (Jake Hoffman), a young couple who are dismayed when her estranged twin sister, Marian (Alessandra Mesa, Ani’s own twin), a touring rock musician, drops by unannounced during a thawing winter and asks to stay for a few days.

Multidisciplinary artist Amalia Ulman makes an appealingly idiosyncratic first foray into features with El Planeta, a captivating throwback to the shaggy aesthetic of micro-budget '90s New York indies that plays like Grey Gardens with a hint of early Almodóvar. Ulman and her real-life mother Ale play a reduced family unit in the Spanish seaside town of Gijón, living beyond their dwindling means in willful denial as the foundations crumble beneath them.

The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet is very much its own creature. In ways that can pull you in and also keep you at a distance, it has no use for movie conventions of plot and characterization as it traces turning points in its 30-something protagonist's life — a life shaped by ordinary strife and joy and, for a while, a strange planetary phenomenon.

"If anyone's taking that gay horse, it's me," declares ruthless ex-military cryptid poacher Nicholas, while Lauren Gray, the heroic protector of mythological creatures in Cryptozoo, prepares to take off on a snowy white Pegasus with a mane and wings in pastel rainbow shades. That kind of droll humor was a constant in graphic novelist Dash Shaw's 2016 feature debut, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea.

Within just a few years, Theo Anthony has proven himself a master of the cine-essay. He doesn't neatly connect the dots for us, instead creating dynamic, synapse-sparking terrains, with particular focus on city life and social justice.

A group of 20 or so women — young, barefoot and in saris — sit in a circle on the floor in the new documentary Writing With Fire. Comprising the staff of Khabar Lahariya, India’s only all-female newspaper (whose title translates to “waves of news”), the women are told that the publication will expand its online operations soon, and they must adapt.

Against-the-odds gambles and the hope for one last chance — these are the dreams that drive horse-racing movies, whether the mood is noir-bleak (The Killing) or feel-good rousing (Seabiscuit). Jockey fits right into that lineage, but what sets it apart is its focus on the working-class realities of the riders, grooms and trainers who travel the smaller circuits, far from the glamour and money of the Triple Crown.

Lawyer, scholar, priest and queer pioneer Pauli Murray is exactly the kind of historical personage for whom the phrase “I can’t believe I’ve never heard of them before!” exists. No less than Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were indebted to Murray for their legal triumphs in overturning segregation and discrimination against women.

Over the past year, many of us have become intimately acquainted with a "remote" approach to life and work. For the protagonist of Land, a woman stricken by unfathomable loss, remoteness is not a matter of cyber readjustments but an existential imperative.

One of the standout debuts of 2020 was Jeremy Hersh's The Surrogate, a superbly acted ethical drama that digs deep into complex interpersonal, psychological, moral and legal questions arising from a third-party reproduction arrangement that takes unforeseen turns. Close friendship added further complications to the childbirth pact in that case, whereas in Nikole Beckwith's Together Together, the pregnancy agreement is purely transactional.

Fox Mulder made the slogan "I Want To Believe" iconic with his UFO poster on The X-Files, but the reason it has spawned so much memorabilia and so many memes is that it speaks to a very human desire. We're a credulous species, even if we're aware that con men and fraudsters abound.

One of last year's big Sundance breakouts was the documentary Boys State, in which high school students play-acted the mechanics of American democracy with results that were simultaneously inspiring and disheartening. Hitting a somewhat similar sweet spot is Maisie Crow's At the Ready, another documentary portrait of Texas teens dipping their toes into grown-up professional waters.

After three feature documentaries, Rodney Ascher has certainly found his niche. In his The Shining-themed Room 237,The Nightmare, about those afflicted with sleep paralysis, and his new A Glitch in the Matrix, he eagerly pushes nonfiction conventions right up to the border of identification with sometimes disturbed interviewees, exploring ideas that burrow into their heads and can wreck or at least transform their lives.

Sparks may be the most interesting band the casual music fan has never heard of. That's certainly the stance taken by director Edgar Wright (Baby Driver, Shaun of the Dead) in his debut documentary chronicling the half-century career of the pop-art (or feel free to add your own label) duo who have dozens of albums to their credit and influenced a seemingly endless number of better-known musicians.

Exquisite performances from Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga provide the pulsing, emotionally heightened center to Passing, Rebecca Hall's assured move behind the camera, adapted with great sensitivity from the 1929 novel by Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen. "We're all of us passing for something or other, aren't we?" muses Thompson's melancholy character Irene Redfield.