‘Sugarcane’ Review: A Haunting Journey Into The Horrors Of Indigenous Past [Sundance]

In the ‘80s, everyone was scared of Satanists. You know, the whole Satanic Panic era.

Twenty years ago, Ondi Timoner’s rock doc “Dig!” the wildly entertaining, sensationalistic portrait of the dysfunctional indie rock bands the Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols and their strange love/hate relationship and rivalry, was a smash hit, at least critically, winning the Sundance Prize Grandy Jury Prize for Best Documentary and squarely landing the filmmaker on the map.

By now, it should be evident that each passing year brings with it advancements in technology, landing anywhere on an imaginary graph containing the likes of the latest smartphone to a car that can brew a mean cup of coffee. One area that’s been hovering over the whole of humanity for far longer than a need for a house that dictates a grocery list is that of the afterlife; pondering what happens after each and every one of us shuffle off this mortal coil remains, quite possibly, an everlastingly unanswerable question, but for those left behind in the wake of a loved one’s passing, a more pressing matter would be the manner in which one deals with said loss, and how best to move on.

Despite the increased awareness of gender identities, there is one classification that has been around for over 100 years or 30 years (it’s debatable) that rarely enjoys the spotlight, intersex. An intersex person can be a broad definition for someone who is born without a number of different sexual characteristics.

Media representation of disabled people is challenging to get right — too saccharine, and you’re veering towards inspiration porn, too maudlin, and you’re implying that a disabled life might not be a life worth living. “Ibelin,” the newest documentary from “The Painter and the Thief” filmmaker Benjamin Ree, strikes a poignant balance, acknowledging the ways that physical disability can limit a life while showing how one complex man expanded his world nonetheless.

The 2024 Sundance Film Festival is almost at an end, but there are still films to screen in the online portion of the festival and, almost as importantly, awards to hand out to happy independent filmmakers. The big winners at this year’s awards ceremony were Alessandra Lacorazza’s “In the Summers” which won the Grand Jury Prize U.S.

Filmmakers have parsed the zombie genre from seemingly every angle possible. George A.

The 2024 Sundance Film Festival is almost at an end, but there are still films to screen in the online portion of the festival and, almost as importantly, awards to hand out to happy independent filmmakers. The big winners at this year’s awards ceremony were Alessandra Lacorazza’s “In the Summers” which won the Grand Jury Prize U.S.

The phrase in the clutch represents an ability to pull off something crucial during an important moment, widely used in the world of sports. These words can be applied to any Hail Mary football pass, any home run while the bases are loaded, or a three-point buzzer beater; it’s the latter with which athletes like Sue Bird are acutely familiar and can be seen several times over the course of “Sue Bird: In The Clutch, “ an aptly named documentary telling the story of one of the finest players the WNBA has ever seen.

Filmmaker Asmae El Moudir, making her feature directorial drama, starts her non-fiction film “The Mother Of All Lies” as a modest family chronicle—an elevated home video of sorts. It is soon clear, though, that she has much more on her mind because the actual subject of her inquiry is the collective amnesia around a seminal event that changed Morocco forever, the 1981 Casablanca bread riots.

Some movies are Irish. “Kneecap” is Ireland.

PARK CITY – Movies that stick with you long after you watch them are nothing new. There are literally thousands of examples in the history of cinema.

“We Are the World” was a once-in-a-generation meeting of musical giants when it was recorded Jan. 28, 1985 — and released two months later on March 7 — to benefit African famine relief.Anyone who was anyone in music at that moment — a who’s who of legends, including everyone from Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and Bob Dylan to Billy Joel, Tina Turner and Bruce Springsteen — showed up to support the cause.Written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and produced by Quincy Jones and ’80s hitmaker Michael Omartian, the single sold a whopping 20 million copies.

The “Erin Brockovich” director moves his camera around so much, you want to yell at the screen, “Settle down, please! I have a headache!” There is a rationale for his nearly-nonstop motion shtick: the audience is experiencing the haunted house from the perspective of a ghost. And this particular ghost apparently needs to get its steps in.However, aside from a couple creepy voyeuristic scenes that the technique complements, its more obvious purpose is for Soderbergh to show off elaborate tracking shots.

A formally rigorous and free-associative dive into a decade’s worth of political fighting in the Congo, from roughly 1955 to 1965, Johan Grimonprez’s “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is a fascinating and sprawling historical overview. Eschewing the usual mix of contextual talking heads, the Belgian filmmaker and multimedia artist instead adopts its narrative approach from the jazz that flows freely throughout the film and helps frame the political struggles of the Congo.

It starts innocuously enough. “Krazy House,” the English-language debut of Dutch filmmakers Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil, launches with a ‘90s family sitcom parody that ribs their cheese and cringe.

China began loosening its one-child policy in 2015 until finally, in 2021, it abolished all restrictions on the number of children a family could have. Young Chinese filmmakers are beginning to grapple with the fallout of those prior decades in new fiction films that demonstrate how the Chinese family unit has been irreversibly transformed.

“Ben Is Back” with Julia Roberts and “Beautiful Boy” starring Timothée Chalamet. A few years back at Sundance I saw the premiere of the awful “Four Good Days” starring Mila Kunis and Glenn Close.

An exploration of the generational trauma surrounding the “stolen generations” of Aboriginal children by the Australian government, Jon Bell’s feature debut “The Moogai” fits all the criteria of what we would, perhaps pejoratively, describe as “elevated horror.” A fraught term, and one that would need more than the length of this review to dive into, it nevertheless seems apt for a film that so blatantly makes its subtext into text.

Coachella, Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits, Summerfest, Pitchfork Music, etc. They all owe an enormous debt to Lollapalooza, the groundbreaking music festival that helped change the touring and music industry just as alternative music peaked in the early 90s.