Sundance Review: Julianne Moore And Finn Wolfhard In Jesse Eisenberg’s ‘When You Finish Saving The World’

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.

Mónica Marie Zorrilla Golden Globe-winning actor Claire Danes will star opposite Jesse Eisenberg and Lizzy Caplan in the FX limited series “Fleishman is in Trouble,” based on the novel of the same name by features journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner. The series hails from ABC Signature and will stream on Hulu.Brodesser-Akner wrote the limited series and executive produces. “Fleishman is in Trouble” centers on a recently divorced forty-something (Toby Fleishman, played by Eisenberg), who starts using dating apps and enjoying his sexual freedom before his ex-wife mysteriously disappears, leaving him with his kids.

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.

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

Albeit beautifully shot and made tolerable by the warm presence of Carla Juri in the leading role, blood is a frustratingly indulgent study of emotional recovery after the loss of a loved one. This fourth feature by Bradley Rust Gray is splendidly appointed with locations in Japan and Iceland and an appreciation of emotional openness expressed by all the characters. All the same, the mostly short scenes of recent widow Chloe handling her grief day by day possess little compelling drama and are handicapped by a scruffy Japanese male lead who just doesn’t match up with his appealing female counterpart in any credible way. As with the director’s previous work, you come out of it wondering who this film was made for.

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.

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 in its truncated virtual Covid-afflicted form last year, the Sundance Film Festival was remarkably able to debut several movies that a year later we are still talking about in the Oscar conversation including CODA, Jockey, Passing, Flee, and Mass. Maybe this success was due to the fact they all had one word titles, but more realistically it was because despite all the drawbacks, the fest honchos picked very well and now awards voters are enjoying the riches.  As I have been seeing one film after another in this year’s (virtual) fest I find myself looking for that breakout movie or performance which with the right distribution we will be talking about still a year from now. There have been some promising performances so far from the likes of Julianne Moore, Bill Nighy and a couple still to come later, but the wow factor really hit me in seeing Emma Thompson in the British film Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, premiering today at Sundance, where to put it mildly, she knocks it out of the park. This is Thompson at her best, a witty, dazzling. and above all brave performance that will undoubtedly be talked about. Her co-star Daryl McCormack  in this two-hander is equally good in the movie which centers on a 60ish widowed mother of two and religious studies teacher who hires a sex worker for a tryst in a hotel room. It is much more complicated than that, in this story of two disparate souls who come together, one full of anxiety and past regrets, the other professional to his core but with a guard he will not let down and a line he will not cross.

Rarely has a filmmaker kept his central character at such a distance as writer-director Ricky D’Ambrose does in The Cathedral. This is clearly an autobiographical work in some very important ways, and no doubt a purging of some demons as well. And yet the kid here, whose life the film follows from birth to his acceptance at college, has very few lines of dialogue and for the most part remains a cipher. All the same, this is a penetrating look at childhood that, distinctively, focuses more than anything on the foibles and shortcomings of the child’s parents, particularly his father.

Virgino and Sisa live what most people would consider a very simple life. They raise and care for Lamas in the Bolivian highlands keeping the traditions of their Quechua people alive.

The primary simultaneous imbalance and blessing of W. Kamau Bell’s We Need To Talk About Cosby is that even with a running time of four-hours, it’s clear by the end there’s still a lot more to say about the ex-convicted sex offender who was once America’s Dad.

Have you ever sensed something is off in your life, and you see the signs but ignore them? Surely, that’s happened to everyone at one time or another. But have those ‘signs’ ever become so surreal and visceral you’re not sure what’s real and what’s reality? That is the core dilemma of Nikyatu Jusu’s horror drama Nanny. The film stars Anna Diop (Titans) as Aisha, a Senegalese immigrant who experiences wild and violent visions she can’t decipher. This is Jusu’s feature film debut competing in the Sundance U.S. Dramatic category. 

The shadow of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 murder mystery Rear Window looms large over Chloe Okuno’s nail-biting Sundance U.S. Dramatic Competition entry, Watcher — but this debut feature is much more than homage. In fact, quite a few other suspense classics get the nod in the film’s trim 95-minute running time. Still, Watcher is very much its own creation, a sustained package that delivers on so many fronts — direction, cinematography, production design, music, performance — that what could have so easily been a formulaic slasher, genuinely pushes the boundaries of its genre, toying with an unusual bleakness that will keep audiences guessing until the end.

“Mom, do you think I can be political?” asks teenage YouTube musician Ziggy Katz (a wide-eyed Finn Wolfhard) to his uptight mom Evelyn (the consistently stellar Julianne Moore). There’s no shortcut to sounding smart, she replies, you have to do the work.

Consider these scenarios: A woman who is unable to get an abortion even though she has a life-threatening condition because of her pregnancy. Women banding together to run underground abortion clinics because the procedure is illegal in their city or state.

A suburban housewife falls in with a group of activists in Call Jane, a Sundance Film Festival premiere directed by Phyllis Nagy, the writer of Carol. Elizabeth Banks is a likeable lead in this story inspired by the network of women who arranged safer illegal abortions in 1960s and ’70s Chicago. Written by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi, it strikes an upbeat, non-judgmental note while exploring the gender and body politics of the time.