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The first line of “Winner” says it all: “My name is Reality Winner.” This uninspired introduction to the character, an NSA employee who leaked classified documents surrounding Russian election interference to the media, sets the tone for what’s to follow. Susanna Fogel’s film is not actively bad, just aggressively bland.

PARK CITY – The grass isn’t always greener is an axiom that has driven horror movies or “almost” horror movies since the silent film era. It’s no surprise then, that Aaron Schimberg’s “A Different Man” is clearly inspired by the noir thrillers of a time gone by.

A raw examination of labor organization at its most powerful, pure, and fragile, “Union” is a look at union drama uncut and without any guardrails. Verité to a fault, directors Stephen Maing and Brett Story present the documentary with a detached remove that isn’t matched by the framing of the central conflict, and yet morsels of true inspiration still manage to tumble forth.

Since returning from his announced retirement from feature filmmaking, Steven Soderbergh has been on a tear of productivity unmatched since the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system. His quickie projects might feel like slight exercises in style or storytelling, but they have never felt disposable.

Men can be overbearing. Some of us know this firsthand because, with a bit of self-awareness, we can recognize we have, at least at some point, been the pompous bloviating jackass while more introverted people, sometimes women, silently sit and endure our blowhard monologues.

At first glance, “Love Lies Bleeding” might look like another Americana-steeped tale of lovers on the run. But a look beyond its sleek hardbodies reveals that director Rose Glass has once again made a monster movie, albeit one of a different character than the spiritual possession in her scorching debut “Saint Maud.” Here, Glass finds a Gothic-tinged tale of passion and pride burning brightly amidst the embers of the eighties.

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.

PARK CITY – Coming up with a new twist for a teen movie ain’t easy. There have been so many over the decades that someone has likely already tried it.

Titus Kaphar’s luminous directorial debut, “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” featuring another electrifying turn by the always-captivating André Holland, begins with a James Baldwin quote. “If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.” READ MORE: Sundance 2024: The 23 Most Anticipated Movies To Watch It’s a bruising quote, given the context of the personal and aching movie, a superbly incandescent but wrenching tale of generational pain, inexcusable parental mistakes, the legacy of family trauma, and, at its core, a broken father/son relationship.

Kobi Libii’s work on the sadly short-lived Comedy Central show “The Opposition with Jordan Klepper” always tended toward the confrontational. By donning the guise of right-wing media provocateurs, he highlighted the absurd internal contradictions of ideological hardliners.

There’s commitment to the bit, and then there’s David and Nathan Zellner. The brothers’ latest film “Sasquatch Sunset,” billed to Sundance audiences as only “a year in the life of a singular family,” makes good on the filmmaking duo’s long desire to make a film about the legend of Bigfoot.

Early in Yance Ford’s visual essay “Power,” he tells the audience that the film to come either requires “curiosity” or  “at least suspicion” from the viewer. It’s the type of bold claim that might pack a punch as a rhetorical hook, especially for a documentary that dives into the cultural, social, economic, and political history of policing in the United States.

“The Greatest Night In Pop” is so entertaining and eminently watchable, and it’s as simple as that. Directed by Bao Nguyen, the acclaimed filmmaker of the Bruce Lee doc “Be Water,” the already-engaging subject matter doesn’t hurt: nearly 50 of the top American music artists in the world all in one room, recording a soon-to-be global hit single.

PARK CITY – To suggest that director Jack Bergert and co-screenwriter Dani Goffstein are playing with fire with the first act of their feature film debuts is an understatement of massive proportions. We haven’t walked out of a movie at a major film festival since before the pandemic, but if we weren’t assigned to review “Little Death” we might have.

Seemingly not wasting one of its 111 offbeat minutes, sprawling and long for a comedy, but not undeserved here, Nate Silver’s “Between The Temples” begins with immediate hilarity. Ben Gottlieb (a terrific Jason Schwartzman) is a sad sack cantor living at home.

Within minutes following the opening fade-in of “Gaucho Gaucho,” a trio of individuals can be seen dashing across a barren landscape, each sitting astride their own majestic-looking horse bathed in a sea of black and white with a South American backdrop beautifully framing the moment. It’s an appropriate setup to this documentary about gauchos, the colloquialism used to describe Argentinian cowboys and cowgirls, as the 84-minute runtime serves as little more than an exercise in striking photography mixed with a series of vignettes that’s as slice of life as one’s likely to find.

It all seems so idyllic at first and sensible, too. Mother of four Maria Gros Vatne narrates the opening minutes of “A New Kind of Wilderness” as the documentary shows videos and still photographs of her husband and kids romping through Norway’s unassuming fields, streams, and woods.

PARK CITY – Whatever your thoughts on Sam and Andy Zuchero’s “Love Me” few will dispute that for an independently financed film it’s a unique and creative achievement. At least a third of the movie is CG animation, another third is motion capture animation, and the final portion is live action.

“These are the tales, the freaky tales,” repeatedly intones Oakland rap legend Too $hort over the interstitials of writer and directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s “Freaky Tales.” This Bay Area anthology film takes its title from the over nine-minute song, which is itself an extended chronicle of prominent personalities the rapper encounters. While the directing duo occasionally approximates something wild in their headrush of 1987 nostalgia, they do not earn the second line of the rap.

When is an aspiring sociopolitical satire so exasperated with what it’s supposedly lampooning that its anger and indignation threaten to undermine the irony of what it’s trying to ridicule? Directed by Austrian pair Daniel Hoesl and Julia Nieman, their Sahara dry, deadpan social satire, “Veni Vidi Vici” (Latin for “I came; I saw; I conquered”)— about the untouchable nature of the rich and powerful of the world, and how consequences for their actions have largely vanished — isn’t necessarily that film.

Steeped in what its audience might deem mature mythology, “The Pink Opaque,” a fantasy show aimed at teen audiences, comes on at 10:30 PM on the Young Adult Network every Saturday. Unfortunately for Owen (first played by Ian Foreman), a meek mixed-race middle school boy growing up in the 1990s, that’s past his strict bedtime.

PARK CITY – It’s 2024. Are you ready for a movie set in the pandemic summer of 2020? Or, like September 11th, another historical event that was hard for Americans to stomach on screen for a good while, do you need a decade or so to process? Your answer to those questions will likely, for better or worse, determine your opinion of Theda Hammel’s “Stress Positions” which debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

PARK CITY – Sometimes the star of the movie isn’t the cast or the director. It’s not the cinematography or the score.

There’s an odd tension and dichotomy coursing throughout the new documentary, “Frida,” an intimacy meets a standard-issue form: a lyrical, magical quality next to something just maybe too safely chronological for its own good. Carla Gutierrez’s new documentary, her directorial debut, is well-meaning and has a clear devotion and affection for her subject, the legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, but as a primarily told cradle-to-grave story, it is doggedly linear and therefore often feels a little familiar.

Alright, it’s January. There is no rest for the wicked, and it’s that time of year again.

Filmmakers love to use horny horror and genre metamorphosis for tales of eroticism or queer eroticism: hell, it works, and it’s often a beguiling mixture of moods, tones, and feelings in our nether regions. And that seems to be what filmmaker Jacqueline Castel is going for with “My Animal,” a surreal, erotic, romantic werewolf movie that premiered at Sundance earlier this year.

It’s challenging and/or impossible to speak about Chilean art and disassociate it from Chilean politics— the two are forever tragically intertwined, bonded together by trauma in a way that few modern countries have experienced. Because Chile suffered a collective social trauma in the 1970s, the country has never recovered and still grapples with it today.

The avant-garde video artist Nam June Paik gets his own adulatory portrait in Amanda Kim’s documentary “Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV.” An act of biographical recovery that also, somehow, flattens a controversial artist, Kim’s film provides just enough contextual information to maintain interest, even if it’s never as radical as its titular subject.  READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated Films At The Sundance Film Festival Moving succinctly from birth to death, Kim provides a broad overview of Paik’s history and aesthetic interests.

Based on the 2013 novel “A Marker to Measure Drift” by Alexander Maksik, set just after the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003, “Drift” aims for impressionistic insight but is ultimately manipulative and reductive. Maksik’s screenplay, which he co-wrote with Susanne Farrell, sees its heroine Jacqueline (Cynthia Erivo, “Harriet”) as nothing more than a vessel to explore an outsider’s view of the trauma inflicted by war.

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead work in such a specific, sui generis key and style, producing such exciting results on a small scale, that it’s genuinely shocking they haven’t been swooped up by the Tentpole Industrial Complex and asked to feed their gifts into the content machine. The conglomerates’ loss is our gain; their latest fusion of science fiction, character drama, dark comedy, and overwhelming paranoia, “Something in the Dirt,” feels like their most personal film – and not just because they wear so many hats, directing and writing and producing and editing and starring.

James Ponsoldt is having the kind of career that future students of the business of film may study with some confusion. He made his name by turning out three indie dramas in four years – “Smashed,” “The Spectacular Now,” and “The End of the Tour” – all well-received, all running the Sundance-premiere-to-boutique-distributor pipeline.

Fran Kranz’s “Mass” is likely one of the most emotionally pulverizing films ever made about America’s gun-violence epidemic – but across its 110-minute runtime, not a single shot is fired.

It’s remarkably rare that anyone makes a hand-drawn animated feature for adults, let alone one as strikingly surreal and seriously minded as Dash Shaw’s “Cryptozoo.” READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated 2021 Sundance Film Festival Premieres This Sundance premiere – honored with the fest’s Innovator Award in its NEXT section for “pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling” – takes place in an alt-history 1960s secretly populated by “cryptids,” including

Irene (Tessa Thompson) rarely passes for white. She fears for her safety too much to do so.

Female trauma’s been given a serious workout in cinema, liberally exercised in the fantasy genre of late.

S.O.S distress calls, fantasy escape from trauma, and forever wars that need to be fought all swirl together in “Mayday,” a dreamy and surreal new feminist fairy tale and revenge film that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival this week. The feature-length filmmaking debut of writer/director Karen Cinorre, “Mayday” centers on Ana, a young woman who is mysteriously transported to an otherworldly and dangerous island.