Sundance Review: Tig Nataro And Stephanie Allynne Debut Film ‘Am I Ok?’

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.”

Dakota Johnson had two highly anticipated movies that premiered during the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and both of them have now sold to streaming services!

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterWarner Bros. and HBO Max has nabbed “Am I OK?,” a romantic comedy starring Dakota Johnson as a woman grappling with her sexuality.

The deals keep coming at the 2022 Virtual Sundance Film Festival. MUBI closed the docu Free Chol Soo Lee, including North America, and Warner Bros is negotiating a near $7 million WW rights deal for the Tig Notaro/Stephanie Allynne film Am I Ok? to place the film on HBO Max. The Lauren Pomerantz-scripted film stars Dakota Johnson, Sonoya Mizuno, Jermaine Fowler, Molly Gordon, June Diane Raphael, and Sean Hayes.

A drama about an undocumented nanny in New York City, a documentary about three exiled dissidents from Tiananmen Square and another doc about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny won top prizes at the Sundance Film Festival. Winners were announced Friday evening in a virtual ceremony.

A drama about an undocumented nanny in New York City, a documentary about three exiled dissidents from Tiananmen Square and another doc about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny won top prizes at the Sundance Film Festival. Winners were announced Friday evening in a virtual ceremony.“Nanny,” from writer-director Nikyatu Jusu and starring Anna Diop and Michelle Monaghan, won the Grand Jury Prize in the drama category for its depiction of a Senegalese immigrant working for a wealthy family in New York City.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.