SA Shines at Sundance!

Despite being shut out of most major awards shows this season, women filmmakers will not go gentle into that good night. Instead they’re pushing back even harder, carving out a space for themselves in tentpole productions, petitions to the Directors Guild and with #GiveHerABreak, a campaign aimed at the Academy Awards’ lack of representation.

Landlocked by South Africa on all sides, the kingdom of Lesotho is a place of high skies, wide landscapes and narrow prospects for its two million inhabitants: a set of dimensions somehow captured in every exquisitely constructed, square-cut frame of “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection.” A haunted, unsentimental paean to land and its physical containment of community and ancestry — all endangered by nominally progressive infrastructure — this arresting third feature from Lesotho-born

Tom Paul can finally exhale. At the end of each November, for more than 20 years, the New York-based sound designer turns nocturnal. Forgoing sleep means he’ll have just enough time to complete the sound edit and mix for the multitude of films he was hired to work on that are premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, the most recent edition of which wrapped on Sunday.

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.

“Giving Voice” has won the Festival Favorite Award, selected by audience votes from the 128 features screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Andy Samberg time-loop comedy “Palm Springs” broke sales records (by the cheeky sum of 69¢), and “Taylor Swift: Miss Americana” inspired a mini mob scene at an otherwise star-starved Sundance. But in the end, the film that defined the 2020 edition of America’s most important indie-movie showcase was a #MeToo revenge thriller called “Promising Young Woman.”

The Sundance Film Festival is fighting a battle that’s been building for several years, and what it’s fighting for can be summed up in one word: relevance. What makes a Sundance movie relevant? In a sense, the old criteria still hold. It’s some combination of box-office performance, awards cachet, and that buzzy, you-know-it-when-you-see-it thing of penetrating to the heart of what we used to call the conversation.

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.

Filmmaker Tabitha Jackson has been named the incoming director of the Sundance Film Festival, succeeding outgoing director John Cooper.

The Sundance Film Festival awards are underway.

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.

In the midst of a whirlwind press tour for her Sundance biopic “The Glorias,” activist icon Gloria Steinem reflected on the state of women’s reproductive rights in Hollywood and beyond.

Anne Hathaway enjoyed a rare public night out with her husband, Adam Shulman, on Monday night. 

PARK CITY, Utah — Twenty years after he blazed onto the film scene, Alan Ball is back with another American beauty.

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.

The tale of the McDonald’s Monopoly-game heist was one hell of a story. Indeed, it seems to have been too much story for “McMillions,” a documentary series premiering at Sundance ahead of a bow on HBO, to tell — even with the benefit of six episodes.

Sony Pictures Classics has acquired worldwide rights to “The Truffle Hunters” out of the Sundance Film Festival. The pact is for $1.5 million, according to an insider.

Benh Zeitlin hasn’t made a film in seven years since he exploded onto the scene with his Best Picture Oscar-nominated “Beasts of the Southern Wild” in 2013. Coming out of hibernation, the director’s “Wendy,” a take on J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival Sunday. Well, was his eagerly anticipated followup worth the wait?