‘TikTok, Boom’ Review: A Look At The Geopolitics Of The World’s Biggest Social App [Sundance]

A “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” movie made for 2022 is a low-expectation enterprise. Is it set in Texas? Is there a massacre? How about a chainsaw? Check the boxes, and off you go.

When I think of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, gentrification, social media, and capitalism are not the words that come to mind. However, director David Blue Garcia and screenplay scribe Chris Thomas Delvin decided to bring all of these elements together to create the first entry on my worst of the year list.

Former "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" star Lisa Vanderpump gave fans an update on her health after suffering a broken leg in a horseback riding incident. Vanderpump, 61, shared photos of flowers she had received while she recovers Sunday on Instagram.  The reality TV star had surgery after fracturing her leg in four places. "Thank you for all the well wishes and beautiful flowers, I am doing much better after surgery!" she wrote in the caption.

Director Paul Hogan is opening up about the worst table read that happened for My Best Friend’s Wedding and it was between Julia Roberts, and Russell Crowe!

Woody Allen’s decade-long downward spiral began after making “Midnight in Paris” in 2011 and following it up with a series of movies ranging from bad to worse to worse than that: “Irrational Man,” “Wonder Wheel,” “Cafe Society,” “A Rainy Day in New York.” At least we have the minor gift of “Blue Jasmine,” a comparatively fine movie according to the pathetic standard set by the rest, to counterpoint the nearly annual stream of Allen’s shrugging dross, but the emphasis is on “minor.” What a difference a change in era made for one of American cinema’s most influential directors.

Sex and the City‘s Samantha Jones got a one-way ticket to London. Executive producer Michael Patrick King explained that actress Kim Cattrall does not have an open invitation to return as the raunchy publicist on And Just Like That.

Directed by Paula Eislet and Tonya Lewis Lee (Spike Lee’s producer and partner), the documentary “Aftershock” chronicles the dismal maternal mortality rate that women of color face in the United States medical system. The statistics are shameful, pointing to a systemic racist indifference, and the documentary chronicles the staggering number of times that expectant mothers entering into hospitals simply do not come out alive due to a lack of care and sensitivity.

In 1973, at the age of 23, Korean immigrant Chol Soo Lee was arrested. An outsider within San Francisco’s Chinatown, Lee was charged with first-degree murder after being accused of shooting a Chinese gang member in the back at point-blank range.

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.

poisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday. Called “Navalny,” it’s a no-holds-barred indictment of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, and insists that Navalny’s close brush with death was the result of a secret state-run operation to assassinate him.“As I became more and more famous guy, I was totally sure that my life became safer and safer because I am kind of famous guy — and it will be problematic for them just to kill me,” Navalny, 45, says in the film. “I was very wrong.” The doc, heading to HBO Max, was added at the last minute to the Sundance slate just as Putin had stationed more than 100,000 troops along the Ukrainian border.

At first glance, actor-writer-director Cooper Raiff’s “Cha Cha Real Smooth” might look like your typical cutesy and whimsical Sundance dramedy, about a twenty-something college graduate learning a valuable life lesson and experiencing a bit of a delayed coming of age. While that’s not an inaccurate description of Raiff’s disarmingly lovely film (programmed in this year’s US Dramatic Competition), what feels miraculous about “Cha Cha” is: it doesn’t come with even an ounce of that cringe-inducing Sundance fancifulness, a brand that many love to hate.

If two people who lack a common language want to communicate, they’ll find a way to communicate. The characters in “blood,” the first new film from Bradley Rust Gray in a decade, don’t exactly lack a common language, but coltish English and crummy Japanese necessitate auxiliary tools for communication, such as food, dance, music, flowers, and art.

The 2022 Sundance Film Festival obviously has so much to offer. Big premieres from indie auteurs, world cinema, documentaries, films for kids, and movies that are receiving so much acclaim right now, you’ll be hearing more from them later in the year upon regular theatrical release.

"Real Housewives of Salt Lake City" star Jennie Nguyen has been fired from the show after a slew of controversial social media posts resurfaced in recent days.  The network announced that Nguyen was let go from the show on Tuesday, acknowledging that it made the decision in direct response to her social media posts that many said were overtly racist.  "Bravo has ceased filming with Jennie Nguyen and she will no longer be a cast member on ‘The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,’" the network said in a statement posted to its Instagram. The statement continues: "We recognize we failed to take appropriate action once her offensive social media posts were brought to our attention.

Addie Morfoot ContributorThis year at the Sundance Film Festival, three feature documentaries — Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s “Aftershock,” Reid Davenport’s “I Didn’t See You There” and Isabel Castro’s “Mija” — share in common a $10,000 grant provided by the Points North Institute and CNN Films’ American Stories Documentary Fund.Launched in 2020, the fund underwritten by CNN has dispensed a total of $100,000 in grants to emerging U.S. filmmakers working on 10 documentary projects that highlight pivotal moments in America. Eiselt and Lewis Lee’s “Aftershock,” and Davenport’s “I Didn’t See You There” are two of nine films in the Sundance U.S.