Sundance Review: Bradley Rust Gray’s ‘blood’

Most kids wouldn’t want to endure high school twice, although there are some who would no doubt prefer to remain there forever. Brandon Lee (no, not the late actor son of Bruce Lee) chose a third path by re-enrolling when he was 32 years old and getting away with it, at least for a while. How it all happened is whimsically recounted in My Old School, a clever, amusing and rather slight account of a Scottish misfit’s most irregular education. Or, as Woody Allen used to describe himself, it’s “thin but fun.”

Utama (Our Home) is precisely the sort of discovery that justifies film festivals and makes them useful: a small, hitherto unheard-of work from an out-of-the-way country that grabs you from the opening minutes and afterwards makes you want to tell your friends they’ve got a real treat to look forward to. A rare Bolivian entry in a major festival, this Sundance World Dramatic Competition title and feature debut by Alejandro Loayza Grisi is gorgeously made and brings to life a backwater existence in a distant land with skill and assurance.

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s highest-profile opposition figure, perennial thorn in Putin’s side and currently a guest in state prison, gets a vigorous up-close-and-personal look in this eventful, fest-moving, never-a-dull-moment documentary from Daniel Roher. A collaboration between HBO Max and CNN Films, Navalny, provides a sustained look at a good-looking, articulate and seemingly unafraid family man who came very close to being murdered on August 20, 2020 by what were quite clearly politically hired killers. The privileged access provides the opportunity for an international public to get a handle on a driven personality who consistently said things very few others are willing to risk. Anyone who follows contemporary international politics will eat it up.

Bob Iger is barely out the door at the Walt Disney Company and a film from a scion of the founding family has already come along to give the well compensated ex-CEO a kick in the ass. However, besides attracting a lot of attention, the Abigail Disney co-directed The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales documentary doesn’t have much to add to the discussions of income inequity, ice cold hearted corporations and the legacy of the Reagan Revolution, except a high profile and well-heeled surname.

If Emily the Criminal had been made in the 1970s, it might have been an angry drama starring Jane Fonda. If it had been made in the ’80s, it would have been a feelgood comedy starring Dolly Parton. And here we are in 2022, where it lands with its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival as a taut, gripping but nevertheless damning portrait of how much ground has been lost in the last 40 years. The setting is America, but the subject is universal: the growth of wage slavery and, in particular, the glass ceiling that exists for people, women in particular, on low income.

Things have not been going well for Emily. Some of it is just terrible luck.

Writer-director Jamie Dack has expanded her widely admired 2018 short film Palm Trees and Power Lines into a considerably more thorny and disturbing feature of the same title. Shot verité style on the most banal possible locations, the film, which is making its world premiere in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section of the Sundance Film Festival, takes an unvarnished look at an environment that is arid both literally and figuratively, one in which young people seem to be given precious little guidance or structure by family or society. Dack doesn’t explicitly editorialize but makes acutely clear the vulnerability of adolescents left too much to their own devices at a formative age.

In 2009, when I was in the Air Force and stationed in Germany, I traveled to Berlin on New Year’s Eve to celebrate. As my friends and I were getting turnt up in the bar, I came out as a lesbian. The moment was random and unprovoked. I shared the news with all my friends and had a dope night ringing in the 2010s, but panic set in when I woke up the next day. I’m 27 years old and a lesbian: what do I do now? 

Attempting to remake a classic film is never an easy assignment. Especially when said classic is as revered as Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 drama “Ikiru.” Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro could have placed the story in contemporary times, making a new version more palatable for some critics, but instead, set it in the exact same era only interchanging London for Tokyo.

Thandiwe Newton, as she now spells her first name, finally gets a role she can really sink her teeth into with God’s Country, a disturbing, unusually class-and-race-conscious modern Western that paints a pretty despairing view of human relations in red state America. Methodically paced and dominated by negative emotions all around, director/co-writer Julian Higgins takes his own sweet time exploring the troubling, unfriendly mindsets on both sides of the fence. Fences, in fact, would have been a very apt title for this quietly simmering study of people who bring little but ill-will to the table.

Krystin Ver Linden’s debut movie Alice arrives with the assurance that it is based on true events, one of those vague guarantees that lingers in the back of your mind while the movie unspools and what you think you’re watching turns out to be something very, very different. Factuality is often a moot point in cinema—with his legendarily terrible 1957 space vampire flick Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood even tried reverse-psychology, asking viewers, “Can you prove that it didn’t happen?” But with a slick slave drama-slash-revenge thriller it immediately raises questions of taste and decency: is this really the proper vehicle for a meditation on Civil Rights? Surprisingly, Ver Linden’s film walks that tightrope very well. There are wobbles for sure, but the commitment from her cast keep its intentions pure even when the storytelling falters, which is often.

Kanye’s demands for the final cut on Jeen-yuhs makes its Sundance premiere all the more fascinating.

With a promising start with his first film Shithouse for which he starred, directed and wrote and won the Grand Jury Narrative Prize at SXSW, Cooper Raiff looms now also to be one of the breakouts of this year’s Sundance Film Festival where Cha Cha Real Smooth, his small but splendid second film for which he performs the same triple threat duties debuted Sunday as part of the Dramatic Competition lineup. I can only imagine if the festival had managed to be in person as originally planned rather than virtual in this Omicron-stricken year it would be met with a massive standing ovation. Raiff is bound to become an indie darling as if further proof was needed, but Cha Cha Real Smooth cements him as the real deal both in front of and behind the camera.

The film had its premiere in the U.S. Dramatic Competition lineup at the Sundance Film Festival.

Even right down to the title this religious comedy debuting appropriately today on a Sunday  in the Premieres section of the Sundance Film Festival can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. Is it Honk For Jesus.? Or is it Save Our Soul.? OR is it as the credits say both? It is a indication of the main problem with this self-styled satire on scandal-ridden Southern Baptist megachurches. Is it supposed to be a comedy? Or is it aiming to be something deeper and more dramatic?  Or is it both?  Even for the best of satirists trying to keep an even tone without watching the whole souffle fall is a slippery slope, one that writer/director Adamma Ebo hasn’t quite solved, but not for lack of trying. As many have discovered, drama is easy, comedy is hard.

Apparently it is the season to celebrate the iconic marriage and professional relationship of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed a penetrating, funny, revealing, and ultimately moving film, Being The Ricardos which covers a lot of ground in the Lucy/Desi world using dramatic license to place several real events in their lives all in the course of one week of production on I Love Lucy. Although starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem as the iconic pair, it felt quite real and actually was as you discover watching Amy Poehler’s marvelous love letter to their lives and times in Lucy And Desi, which like Ricardos will be available on Amazon Prime, the perfect companion piece to Sorkin’s film, and a compelling documentary portrait all on its own.

Terrence Malick meets Robert Eggers in You Won’t Be Alone, a bloody—and bloody good—vampire tale that squeezes quite a few new twists out of fundamentally familiar material. Rapturously beautiful and sufficiently different from its bloodsucking brethren to engage fresh interest in aspects of the undead, Australian director Goran Stolevski’s very confident debut feature goes places its generic brethren never thought of visiting. This Sundance 2022 entry in the World Dramatic Competition section should serve its purpose of putting its creator on the map while providing any number of fresh twists on familiar material. Commercial release via Focus Features is currently pegged for April 1.

Resurrection is a tedious, one-note paranoiac thriller that never shifts gears to get out of its rut. With classy production values and a tony cast led by Rebecca Hall and Tim Roth, writer-director Andrew Semans’ first feature in a decade, since the similarly plotted Nancy, Please, grinds on trying to build suspense but doesn’t have much of a clue as to how to tease and tantalize an audience. A significant theatrical release for this Sundance Premieres item seems most unlikely.

Lena Dunham hasn’t made a feature film since Tiny Furniture 12 years ago, but she has some plausible excuses—running Girls for six seasons, conceiving another series, writing two books, acting here and there. It took the pandemic to get her behind the camera again and, low and behold, the resulting film is about people living in very close quarters, not going out much and, at least for some, having a lot of sex. Sharp Stick brims over with the energy of young people who wanted to make something, quickly and down and dirty. The result is an invigorating film about a beautiful woman who, in her mid-20s, sheds her lifelong avoidance of sex to dive into the deep end. The FilmNation production is making its world premiere in the Premieres section of this year’s festival.

I might be tempted to call writer/director James Ponsoldt’s new coming of age film about four young girls who discover the dead body of a man on the last summer days before starting middle school, Stand By She. Okay I will. Its actual title is Summering and it is a sweet and sincere attempt to give young girls the kind of edge-of-turning-teen story of a last summer of no worries with your friends that has mostly been reserved for boys in classic Hollywood films in the genre. With a screenplay Ponsoldt with co-writer Benjamin Percy was inspired to create coming out of the pandemic, and new questions about life presented to our youngest members of the planet, they land on a somewhat dark situation. Four carefree young girls come face to face with death, and some special bonding in this unusual entry into the Kids section of the Sundance Film Festival where it is premiering today. Ponsoldt wanted to make this one for his daughter, and maybe he says even a sister or mother or any female who didn’t have the kind of role models on screen boys did as he was growing up.