Review: An imperialist repents in 'Gangsters of Capitalism'

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticTikTok, the omnipresent video-based social-media app that launched five years ago, has always seemed a less serious, more frivolously youthquakey destination than a number of other online networking services — most obviously Facebook. Yet as Shalini Kantayya’s sprightly, informative documentary “TikTok, Boom.” makes clear, there are more levels to the TikTok phenomenon than there are to almost any other blockbuster app.There are the countless people who consume it: the kids from all over the world who get addicted to watching the up-to-three-minute-long videos (dances, pranks, sexy flaunts, tutorials, monologues, protest messages) as if they were popping Sour Patch Kids.

Richard Kuipers Family photos, propaganda images and grainy archival footage are manipulated, re-processed and overlaid with wonderfully simple and highly effective animation in “Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish.” This imaginative documentary essay by 36-year-old U.S.-based Chinese artist-animator-filmmaker Lei Lei assembles striking imagery and deeply personal audio recordings to chart his family’s history in China from the late 1950s to the early ’70s. Though it runs a little too long, “Silver Bird” should have a bright future at general film festivals and those specializing in animation.After basing his 2019 feature debut “Breathless Animals” on his mother’s recollections of life in 20th century China, Lei has turned this time to audio interviews he conducted with his father Lei Jiaqi and grandfather Lei Ting in China between 2012 and 2021.

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details of this morning’s Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony live on NBC.

William Earl It’s been more than two decades since Björk’s once-maligned, now-revered Marjan Pejoski “swan dress” became the talk of the 73rd Academy Awards red carpet, and since then her way-left-of-center proclivities have become more and more commonplace. Kanye West wearing a mask while performing the seismic Yeezus Tour? Lady Gaga’s meat outfit? Katy Perry’s singing, phallic mushrooms during her Vegas residency and latest “SNL” performance? All seem directly sprung from the Icelandic singer’s performance art universe.

Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest have expressed their sadness at the tragic death of Miss USA pageant and TV host, Cheslie Kryst. The LIVE! stars took to their show's Instagram Stories after the Extra correspondent died from a suspected suicide on 31 January. MORE: Regina King devastated following death of her only child Cheslie was pronounced dead after falling from her apartment building in Manhattan, New York. She was just 30 years old. WATCH: Stars gone too soonKelly and Ryan shared a photo alongside the late star and captioned it:"So sad to hear of Cheslie Kryst's passing.

Filmmaker Rory Kennedy’s “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” is perhaps the quintessential modern American tale. A prestigious company that had the most outstanding reputation in aviation, cultivated over several decades pissed that all away, and was responsible for the deaths of almost 350 people through cutting corners and taking shortcuts meant to maximize profits and appease shareholders.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticSPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched “You Who Cannot See, Think of Those Who Can,” the Jan. 30 episode of “Euphoria.”At the risk of writing too personally about a show that’s all about personal upheaval, I had wondered whether parenthood might turn me off “Euphoria.”I was an admirer of the show’s first season, which aired in 2019, but after becoming a parent in 2020 I suspected that the show’s depiction of American teenagerhood as a broken-down garden of temptation might not intrigue me as it had once before.

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.

Manori Ravindran International EditorOne of the most controversial movies to emerge from this year’s Sundance Film Festival is a documentary called “Jihad Rehab,” which follows a group of former Guantanamo Bay detainees.Directed by American filmmaker Megan Smaker — a former California firefighter who spent five years in Yemen — the film follows several Yemeni men who were unlawfully detained for 15 years in the U.S.-run detention camp, before being relocated to Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Bin Nayef Centre for Counselling and Care — a so-called “rehabilitation center” for extremists who must graduate the program before they’re allowed to rejoin society.The film tracks Ali, Nadir and Mohammed’s turbulent journey over three years as they try to come to grips with their trauma and navigate an uneasy future in Saudi Arabia, where it’s illegal for them, as Yemenis, to leave. (A Saudi-led coalition of Gulf states infiltrated Yemen’s civil war in 2015, carrying out air raids that have devastated the nation.) While “Jihad Rehab” isn’t the first film in the grisly orbit of Guantanamo, its Sundance premiere has received heavy criticism from human rights advocates and other documentarians, many of them from Arab or Muslim backgrounds, who are concerned that the doc’s subjects are being framed as criminals (despite never standing trial in the U.S.

including here at TheWrap), but has drawn fire on social media for the fact that the film calls the men “terrorists,” and because the filmmaker herself is not Muslim. One typical tweet by writer Jude Chehab of Turkish news website TRT World says: “When I, a practising Muslim woman say [the film’] is problematic, my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying it’s not.”Smaker, who spent five years making the film, told TheWrap that the movie challenges assumptions about people Americans regard as terrorists, while also offering a never-before-seen perspective into the men who embraced the ideology of groups like al Qaeda.

Guy Lodge Film CriticFor a few minutes at the very outset, “Home Team” threatens to be more interesting than it looks. Announcing itself in the opening credits as based on a true story, Charles and Daniel Kinnane’s film opens on the New Orleans Saints’ victory in the 2010 Super Bowl — an unlikely triumph for coach Sean Payton that was tainted two years later by his suspension over the Bountygate scandal, which saw the Saints accused of paying out bonuses to injure rival players.

Rabbi Israel Dresner was a civil rights activist who protested segregation alongside his friend, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968).Dresner began his life of activism young, well before he became a rabbi, as World War II raged overseas.

Apple has closed the biggest deal of the 2022 Virtual Sundance Film Festival, securing worldwide rights to the Cooper Raiff-directed Cha Cha Real Smooth for around $15 million. The streamer has been the front runner for the picture since it premiered January 23 in the US Dramatic Competition category.

In the most cramped of times – days as economically and emotionally pinched as the ones we’re living through now, and the ones we survived (or didn’t) in 2008 – theater can remind us of, or point the way to, some sense of emotional generosity, of expansive spirit, of connection. Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew does all that and more, finding hope in the unlikeliest of places, like a cluttered, ramshackle break room of a noisy, about-to-fail factory in an about-to-fail city like Detroit.

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.

Jessica Kiang Given the Chinese government’s frighteningly successful attempts at retroactively erasing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from history, there is an urgent need for a soup-to-nuts retelling of that incident, solidly laying out the facts and figures, insofar as they can be known. “The Exiles,” from debut directors Violet Columbus and Ben Klein, is not that film, although some of its most powerful sequences could be repurposed in their entirety to that end.Instead, Columbus and Klein present a palimpsest of erratically overlapping perspectives.

Six months after 9/11, firefighter turned “Jihad Rehab” filmmaker Meg Smaker left her job as a Bay Area firefighter to travel to the Middle East to better understand the world she lived in.After making a pit stop in Afghanistan, Smaker moved to Yemen to study Arabic and Islam, and got a job there running a firefighting academy. “So I was a head fire instructor, teaching Yemeni men to fight fire in Yemen, which is where I was when I first heard about the rehab center, when I was living in Yemen and teaching a firefighting like course,” Smaker tells Sharon Waxman at The Wrap’s Sundance Studio.