'The Fight': Film Review | Sundance 2020

A comic road movie dedicated to the belief that sex is an experience that should be available to all humans — those who can pay, anyway —Richard Wong's Come as You Are finds three Americans with disabilities taking a long drive north to a Canadian brothel designed to cater to them.

Winner of both prizes awarded in the Next category of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, “I Carry You With Me” tells the true story of an undocumented gay couple from Mexico who risk their lives for love, liberty and the American Dream.

Sixty years. That’s how long a Louisiana judge sentenced Rob Richardson to serve for armed bank robbery. Garrett Bradley covers more than a third of that term in “Time,” and the cumulative impact — boiled down into an open-minded and deeply empathetic 81 minutes — will almost certainly rewire how Americans think about the prison-industrial complex.

When Tim Bell died in London last summer, the media response was largely, somewhat sheepishly, polite: It was hard not to envision the ruthless political spin doctor still massaging his legacy from from beyond the grave. “Irrepressible” was the first adjective chosen in the New York Times obituary.

Every summer, more than 1,000 teens swarm the Texas capitol building to attend Boys State, the annual American Legion-sponsored leadership conference where these incipient politicians divide into rival parties, the Nationalists and the Federalists, and attempt to build a mock government from the ground up.

Most Americans who don't live on the Gulf Coast have, in all likelihood, long ago stopped thinking about the causes and effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. It's impossible to hold all the world's crises in your mind at once, and a relief to set one aside.

It’s a rare occasion when a first-time American filmmaker embraces the metaphysical, and rarer still when said director does so without embarrassing pretentiousness, but Edson Oda thinks big and mostly pulls it off inNine Days. Uneven but stunningly crafted and concerned with nothing less than who deserves a space on the planet Earth, this is a carefully thought-out original creation that some will argue belongs in an art installation sooner than in a commercial cinema.

It took four movies before Lee Isaac Chung was ready to tell the kind of story first-timers so often rush to share straight out of the gate. Not a coming-of-age movie so much as a deeply personal and lovingly poetic rendering of his Korean American childhood — specifically, how it felt for his immigrant family to adjust to life in small-town Arkansas — “Minari” benefits from the maturity and perspective Chung brings to the project.

Giving Voice is an invigorating look at African American playwright August Wilson’s legacy through the eyes of a cohort of hopeful young theater students across the country. This talented group of high school students compete in the 2018 August Wilson Monologue Competition by performing a monologue of their choice from one of Wilson’s ten plays — each play focuses on one decade of twentieth-century black life — and the doc introduces us to six of the students in the competition.

In her feature-length debut Farewell Amor, Ekwa Msangi explores the meaning of home for an Angolan immigrant family newly reunited in New York City after almost two decades apart.According to the United Nations, the United States currently hosts 51 million international migrants (about 19 percent of the world’s population), the largest number of any country in the world.

Inventor Nikolai Tesla is more popular today than when he died penniless in a New York hotel in 1943. Back then, he was the futurist who swore he could summon unlimited, clean, wireless electromagnetic energy from the earth — a neat idea, but surely coal and oil were fine.

Brooklyn couple Su (Sunita Mani) and Jack (John Reynolds) have several plans to salvage their lives. Go vegetarian, plant a garden, make sourdough bread, and above all, quit the internet addiction that’s become their relationship’s third wheel, distracting them from make-outs and barging into their fights until Su yells, “Alexa stop!” To detox, the couple embarks on a phone-free week in upstate New York.

If you didn't know better, you might almost imagine that The Nest, writer-director Sean Durkin's long awaited follow-up to his debut Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), was inspired by a lost Henry James novel.

A knack for creepy atmospherics and individual scares goes a long way in the horror genre, and it takes “The Night House” pretty far. Though this tale of a new widow’s apparent haunting gets progressively lost in a narrative maze that’s complicated without being particularly rewarding, director David Bruckner suffuses the action with enough dread and unpleasant goosings to make this an above-average genre exercise.

Pete (Will Ferrell) and Billie (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) are a prosperous American couple who’ve taken their two sons on a ski vacation to the Alps. Are they having fun yet? That’s a question that hovers over the movie, as the family members hit the slopes and make pilgrimages to the alpine-lodge restaurant, or retire to their room, where they always feel guilty about playing games or watching TV, since they could do that anywhere.

Writer-director Radha Blank’s coming-of-age-in-your-40s tale is a love letter full of more love letters. It’s a love letter to the people of pre-gentrified Harlem (she’s a New York native), to old-school hip hop, to struggling artists, to young people with big dreams and to black women who dare to live life out of the box.

In “The Glorias,” Julie Taymor’s pinpoint timely yet rousingly old-fashioned biopic about the life and times of Gloria Steinem, the legendary feminist leader is portrayed by four different actresses at four different stages of her life.

A breezily off-beat affair from the West African coastal nation of Angola, Air Conditioner (Ar condicionado) should beguile and captivate those able to adapt to its idiosyncratic rhythms and humor. A highly accomplished and promising first full-length fictional outing for US-trained mono-monikered multi-hyphenate "Fradique" (a.k.a.

Uncle Frankmarks the return to feature filmmaking after a long hiatus for Alan Ball, the innovative showrunner behind TV's Six Feet Under and True Blood.

Addiction, you could say (and I would), has become the central demon that plagues Americans. We’re addicted to everything: alcohol, illegal drugs, pharmaceutical drugs, psychotropic drugs, sugar-bomb soft drinks, processed food, video screens…you name it.