'Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness': Film Review | Sundance 2020

In “Schindler’s List,” most of the actors spoke English, using accents to indicate their characters’ origins. In “Son of Saul,” the cast struggles to communicate in a mish-mosh of languages, as Jews of different nationalities were thrown together in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Stories about the Holocaust — so vital in trying to reconcile the horrors of the past century — must at some point take a philosophical stand on how to deal with how their characters express themselves.

Director Vadim Perelman and frequent Berlinale film star Lars Eidinger on Saturday championed their new Holocaust-set “Persian Lessons” as a timely, very German tale of how that dark history is closer to us than it seems, made uniquely possible by the fact that most of the film’s production team is not German.

By Andreas Wiseman

An immersive political documentary that might be useful as a glass half-full/half-empty personality test, Ramona S.

Lyrical and provocative,Acasă, My Homebrings an intimate slant to age-old questions about the value of conformity, the pleasures and challenges of the natural world versus the comforts and distractions of modernity, and the amorphous but essential matter of what constitutes a good life.

A wide range of Scandinavian films, including the politically-charged Danish drama “Shorta,” the supernatural Icelandic drama “Lamb” with Noomi Rapace, and the Finnish-Iranian refugee tale “Any Day Now,’ were some of the highlights at this year’s Nordic Film Market.

It's the little indignities that get you. Not that the inciting incident in writer-director Visar Morina's very fine Exil is in any way trivial.

Netflix seriously raised the bar on the true-crime police procedural with Unbelievable, its shattering, forensically detailed miniseries about the hunt for a serial rapist. That standard of excellence does no favors to this poorly scripted feature from the streaming platform, based on the unsolved Long Island Serial Killer case in which more than a dozen sex workers were murdered over a period of almost 20 years.

Playing a security worker (like a TSA agent) at London's Stansted airport whose simmering mental unease finally comes to a rolling boil one day, Ben Whishaw contributes a scalding performance in Surge.This feature debut for director Aneil Karia, who has directed episodes of edgier TV shows such as Top Boy and Pure in the U.K., grew out of an earlier collaboration between Karia, Whishaw and movement coach Laura Williamson Biggson, the short filmBeat.

Everyone has a favorite book that we long to see adapted into a film so more people will know about the book and read it too. At the same time, we also dread the filmmakers will ruin it by misrepresenting or diluting the essence of what makes that book so special.For many people living with autism, their most beloved tome on the subject is The Reason I Jump.

It's easy to see why documentary and TV director Andrew Cohn's first narrative feature, The Last Shift, was at one time considered as a project for Alexander Payne, who remains on board as executive producer. Empathy for aging men navigating complicated crossroads in their unfulfilled lives has often shaped Payne's films and very much applies to the terminal under-achiever played here with characteristic dimension and heart by the ever-reliable Richard Jenkins.

By Andreas Wiseman

Writer-director Michael Almereyda is an idiosyncratic storyteller with an affinity for brainy radicals and the work of forward-thinking scientific minds, most recently in Experimenter and Marjorie Prime.

Anne Hathaway enjoyed a rare public night out with her husband, Adam Shulman, on Monday night. 

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.

Anyone who saw director Louise Osmond's 2015 documentary Dark Horse, winner of the audience award at Sundance that year, knew it was a racing certainty that this almost-too-good-to-be-true story would get made into a feature film someday.

The best film about the wages of aging sinceAmoureight years ago,The Fathertakes a bracingly insightful, subtle and nuanced look at encroaching dementia and the toll it takes on those in close proximity to the afflicted.

Is it possible to be a good-guy drug dealer? If your operation brings money to people who need it, and you're not exploiting desperate addicts? The Sacklers of the world may sleep well at night, but the protagonist of Braden King's The Evening Hour has to live among those whose lives are colored by the drugs he sells; even in the best scenario, any rationalization he constructs for what he does would seem unsustainable for long.

Like a wiry groundhog in biking shorts, Lance Armstrong likes to periodically poke his head out of his hole, offer a few utterances of the truth and then retreat for another six months (or several years) of obfuscation or delusion.It's perhaps the most underrated upside of having spent decades lying to absolutely everybody about nearly everything: that you can similarly turn the truth-telling process into a multiyear adventure.The latest chapter in Lance Armstrong's confessional journey is