Sundance 2023 Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

Roger Ebert once wrote, “just because something is not done anymore doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing,” when describing Norman Jewison’s irrepressible romantic comedy “Only You.” This same sentiment can be applied to Angus MacLachlan’s latest family dramedy, “A Little Prayer,” a welcome throwback to adult-oriented movie fare of yore like “On Golden Pond,” “Fried Green Tomatoes,” or “Passion Fish.

The "Thoroughbreds" and "Bad Education" filmmaker's sci-fi/comedy finds him working on a larger canvas, but to lesser effect.

Not quite a traditional horror film, not quite a coming-of-age drama, and not quite a true supernatural fable, Christopher Murray’s “Sorcery” is a difficult film to categorize. It’s dark, grim, and angry, like a revenge horror film.

Brendon (Algee Smith) isn’t a bad kid. An aspiring artist living in Los Angeles, in his last month of high school, the pressures of his daily life, however, are beginning to overwhelm him.

Ira Sachs prefers relationships of the doomed variety — tempestuous passions torn asunder, sometimes by external forces like capitalism, which complicated the search for a home through New York’s cutthroat real estate market in “Love Is Strange” and “Little Men.” His latest film — the sexy, frustrating, loose-yet-compact, altogether irresistible three-hander “Passages” — also concerns property contracts and a homeless protagonist. However, this one’s got nobody but himself to blame for that predicament, fluent as he is in the same toxic strain of amour fou that previously perfumed the air in “Keep the Lights On” and especially Sachs’ debut, “The Delta.” As in that film — also pitched at the admirably humble quotidian scale Sachs hasn’t felt the need to exceed in more than a quarter decade — “Passages” follows a bisexual chaos agent so wrapped up in his own narcissism that he can’t see where his self-exploration ends and insensitivity to those around him begins.

Like most teenagers, Heather (non-binary actor Bobbi Salvör Menuez), a social misfit who lives in a rural town in northern Canada, has a strict midnight curfew to adhere to. But unlike other teenagers, staying out for longer has a much more dangerous effect on her.

The opening scene of Kenneth Dagatan’s sophomore feature, “In My Mother’s Skin,” promises the audience each of the horror genre’s grisliest thrills: The squelching sounds of oozing blood, the sight of flesh-ripping carnage in progress as well as in past tense, a carnivorous monster with a death rattle that’d make Sadako Yamamura croak with pride and a rangy tongue that’d stir Gene Simmons’ admiration. Dagatan keeps his promises.

Ria Khan (Priya Kansara, sparkling in her feature debut) likes to believe that she’s no ordinary British-Pakistani teenager. Her dreams, for instance, always seem outsized — she doesn’t just want to learn martial arts but rather perfect it so well that she can become a world-class professional stunt woman.

There was a time when it seemed like every movie trailer for every single comedy began with bouncy music and a voice-over artist explaining cheerfully, “[NAME OF PROTAGONIST] had it all!” But at the beginning of Nicole Holofcener’s “You Hurt My Feelings,” Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) does, in fact, seem to have it all: she’s in a long-lasting marriage with a successful therapist, they have a great apartment on the Upper West Side, their 23-year-old son Eliot (Owen Teague) is writing his first play, she teaches writing at the New School, and she’s just finished her second book.

If Jordan Firstman did not exist, it would be necessary for Sebastián Silva to invent him. “Discomfort rooted in class friction” and “the perverse amusement of watching people be annoying” rank high on the list of stalwart indie filmmaker Silva’s favorite recurring themes, and no modern type marries the two quite as handily as the social media influencer that plague of shamelessly promotional non-celebrities who adopt the entitled mindset of fame long before breaking into the industry sector accommodating it.

Heading into the first weekend of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, many filmgoers likely have their schedule tightly planned for what films they are viewing for the next week. If it isn’t there already, one film to add to your schedule is “5 Seasons of Revolution” by Lina.

The "Once" and "Sing Street" filmmaker is back with another testimonial to the transformative power of popular music.

From Jesus’s ripped physique to the Song of Solomon, there’s something about Christian iconography that’s just a little bit sexy. And if you haven’t noticed that yet, you certainly will after seeing “Mamacruz,” the second film from Venezuelan writer-director Patricia Ortega (“Yo, Imposible”).

In Montana’s Big Sky Country, a black cloud hangs over the state’s expansive horizon. It looms above the indigenous residents of the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations and nearby towns in Big Horn County most of all.

While it may seem niche to those outside of Texas, high school mariachi competitions are quite prolific in the Lonestar State. The teams give students a creative outlet, as well as an opportunity to pursue scholarships in college music.

A memory, tinged with aching rawness, emerges in “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” the feature debut by writer/director Raven Jackson. This memory briefly foretells the knotting stream of remembrances that roots our protagonist, Mack (played in these early childhood scenes by a sage Kaylee Nicole Johnson). It begins in 1970, with young Mack’s hands softly holding a fishing reel, its pole stretched across the frame.

There’s a popular song in North Korea called “Nothing to Envy.” Lines include, “Who can ever break our strength? / We are not afraid of any storm or stress” and “Our home is the bosom of the Party / We are all brothers and sisters / We envy nothing in the world.” Though they lack running water, indoor plumbing, and basic freedom of thought — to name just a few things — North Koreans are taught to believe that they genuinely have it better than any other country on earth.

There’s crazy, there’s batshit crazy, and then there’s Brandon Cronenberg’s definition of crazy. It’s a crazy that’s impossible to contain and even more impossible to label: a mind-bending neon-lit nightmare bursting at the seams with perverse imagery, an abrasive embrace of the grotesque, and a ravishing explosion of seduction and power.

Spanning three time periods and two continents, “Past Lives,” the directorial debut of Celine Song (“Endlings”), tells the story of two childhood friends and sweethearts pulled apart by time, circumstance, and fate. They come back together and end in a way that might subvert the romantic fantasies of the audience — but this only shows the important roles people play in our lives, even if it’s not what we expected.  READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated Films At The Sundance Film Festival Disembodied voices start us off in “Past Lives,” making guesses at who Nora (Greta Lee), Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), and Arthur (John Magaro) are to each other as they sit at an NYC bar.

PARK CITY – Listen, we’re not going to sit here while you read this review and pretend that we’re a musical theater expert. Sure, we may be The Playlist’s default gay/queer/LGBTQ+ critic, but “the stage” usually isn’t our thing.

Starting with early frames that capture one very cold East Coast winter with cozy grain, director William Oldroyd’s gorgeous yet thin-spread drama-thriller “Eileen” looks like the kind of movie one wishes to luxuriate in. Indeed, the masterful “Lady Macbeth” director’s period piece promises to be the cinematic equivalent of a lavish fur coat at first glance, so inviting in its smoky mahogany interiors and mutedly warm color palette that it feels easy to slip into, no questions asked.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Alice Englert’s “Bad Behaviour” is a dirty bomb of a movie, and it almost seems intentionally devised to keep the viewer off-balance. What at first appears a rather obvious send-up of self-help culture turns into a take-no-prisoners assault on narrative expectations and norms, all the while painting a pointed portrait of a truly complicated protagonist, the kind of character whose motivations and intentions are so slippery, you can barely make up your mind about her before she gives you a reason to change it again.

“From the YouTube sensations…” isn’t exactly the phrase you want to hear going into a film — horror or otherwise. This set-up brings a certain amount of baggage that the audience will be hard-pressed to shake, regardless of the filmmaker’s talent.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Alice Englert’s “Bad Behaviour” is a dirty bomb of a movie, and it almost seems intentionally devised to keep the viewer off-balance. What at first appears a rather obvious send-up of self-help culture turns into a take-no-prisoners assault on narrative expectations and norms, all the while painting a pointed portrait of a truly complicated protagonist, the kind of character whose motivations and intentions are so slippery, you can barely make up your mind about her before she gives you a reason to change it again.

The thorny, complicated history between the United States and Iran is infinitely more complex for those of the Persian diaspora living in America. It’s this nuanced tension trickling down to identity — between being too much this and not enough that in either homeland — that writer-director-producer Maryam Keshavarz (“Circumstance”) explores in her third film, “The Persian Version,” a decades and generation-spanning dramedy.

PARK CITY – One of the best accomplishments a documentary can pull off is making its audience uncomfortable. Maybe even squirm in their seats a little.

Over the past few years, it’s thankfully become more common to find screenings with closed captioning at your local multiplex. Not just theaters that hand out closed captioning devices — which often require another layer of artifice between the audience and the movie — but actual onscreen captions.

You don’t get very far into “5 Seasons of Revolution” before you realize something is off with one of the documentary’s participants. That person is Susu, a friend of the film’s director (simply credited as “Lina”).

Richard Pryor used to do a bit on the differences between Black and white churches – one that was often revised and revisited by his many imitators in the decades that followed. But one thing he got particularly right, beyond the lameness of the hymns and the restrained quality of the ministers, is the eerie quiet of white churches, the way that the fires of hell and the sins of man can be described in tones barely more threatening than a hot dish recipe.

“I don’t spend much time thinking,” says 20-something Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), a troubled and displaced Afghan insomniac, to her doctor in the terrific, breakthrough indie “Fremont.” Why? he asks inquisitively. “Too busy with my social life,” she answers, with confidence so cool and so far from the truth, it’s laugh-out-loud comical.

On second thought, we may have let our collective nostalgia for erotic thrillers get a tad out of hand. Chloe Domont’s “Fair Play” seems, at least at the level of its inception, to be a thought exercise: what would it look like to make something like “Disclosure,” but from the perspective, and with sympathy towards, the Demi Moore character? That Barry Levinson adaptation of a Michael Crichton thriller has aged like a bottle of milk on a radiator, a baffling stew of corporate intrigue, shitty special effects, and spectacularly terrible sexual politics.

On second thought, we may have let our collective nostalgia for erotic thrillers get a tad out of hand. Chloe Domont’s “Fair Play” seems, at least at the level of its inception, to be a thought exercise: what would it look like to make something like “Disclosure,” but from the perspective, and with sympathy towards, the Demi Moore character? That Barry Levinson adaptation of a Michael Crichton thriller has aged like a bottle of milk on a radiator, a baffling stew of corporate intrigue, shitty special effects, and spectacularly terrible sexual politics.

While introducing “Radical,” director Christopher Zalla (“Sangre de Mi Sangre”/”Blood of My Blood”) said it was a labor of love. In addition to that, he said it’s a “movie about what happens when kids are empowered.” And while the film definitely explores this in a well-crafted display of filmmaking, it also leaves a bit of a dark shadow in the minds of those allergic to the notion that your mind is all you need to succeed.

The last few years have been great times for documentaries about cults. That does not mean it is a time of introspection about the questing impulses driving people into cults.  The appeal of content—generally of the limited streaming series variety—about cults has more to do with the queasy fright provided by seeing roomfuls of people prostrate themselves before a bored-looking bearded guy on a dais.

PARK CITY – If someone were to tell you an out-and-proud wrestler in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s Lucha libra scene became not only a title holder but a public sensation you might not believe it. A gay wrestler? In “macho” Mexico, no less? Even in the U.S., the first WWE publicly gay wrestler didn’t arrive on the scene until 2012.

PARK CITY – When a toddler age Alysia Abbott moved to San Francisco with her father Steve in 1973 her life took a decidedly different direction. She was raised in what today would still be considered unconventional circumstances (no, it wasn’t in a commune).