Aubrey Plaza Goes To Extremes As ‘Emily The Criminal’ [Sundance Review]

Premiering in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at this year’s all-virtual Sundance Film Festival, Nikyatu Jusu’s unsettling “Nanny” is a supernatural thriller that weaves together strands of domestic drama and West African folklore.

“We grew up in Atlanta and in the church. Like in the height of Southern Baptist megachurches.

It took Evan Rachel Wood years to muster the courage to name her abuser. A lot of people knew who he was, divorced from her, because of his job, his public persona, his notorious reputation — controversial, provocative, fundamentally harmful.

“If we break any human being open, they contain worlds; they contain galaxies, and we’re often not as curious or interested in the people all around us.” Video essayist turned filmmaker Kogonada’s remarkable feature debut “Columbus” was about the meeting of two worlds invisibly occupying the same space. The film almost feels out of time, or that itself time stops, every time its lead characters find meaning and solace in one another.

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.

Every so often, the movies like to argue with themselves by dropping two versions of the same story within spitting distance of one another: “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano,” “Deep Impact,” and “Armageddon.” The one-two punch of Sean Baker’s “Red Rocket” and Jamie Dack’s “Palm Trees and Power Lines” is, for clarity’s sake, nothing like dueling dumb-dumb disaster spectacles, but to consider Dack’s film without considering Baker’s is both impossible – everyone at Sundance is doing it– and frankly careless (but mostly impossible).

Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead go way down the rabbit hole in their new film, “Something In The Dirt,” one of the big standout films from the Sundance Film Festival. A pandemic brainchild of necessity—what can we shoot during the pandemic which is relatively inexpensive but still doable, so we don’t lose our marbles and can stay artistic—“Something In The Dirt” is a trippy, DIY, sci-fi-ish film about a pair of loser (played by the two filmmakers themselves) dudes in dystopic Los Angeles who stumble upon the unexplainable.

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.

“Have you ever felt vertigo looking into the sky?” Nadeem Shahzad asks over voiceover roughly fifteen minutes into “All That Breathes.” The accompanying shot looks straight up into a sunny yet smog-streaked sky as a swirl of black kites swoops and careens overhead. The birds are numerous, too many to count, but their movements are mesmerizing.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter“Living,” an acclaimed re-imagining of Akira Kurosawa’s classic meaning-of-life story, has been sold to Sony Pictures Classics follow its premiere at Sundance Film Festival.Sony Pictures Classics, the indie division of Sony Pictures, has acquired rights in North America, Latin America, India, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Germany, South Africa, Southeast Asia, and airlines worldwide. A release date has not been announced yet.“Living” was directed by Oliver Hermanus and written by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro.

EXCLUSIVE: Living, one of the Sundance buzz titles since its January 21 premiere, has been acquired by Sony Pictures Classics for around $5 million for North American and some international territories, Deadline hears. This after a brisk auction involving the likes of Neon, Bleecker Street, and Focus Features.

Hiding underwater to escape her vicious aggressors, a rush of terror washes over Sara (Laura Galán), a large-bodied teenager target of incessant insults, and worse, about her weight. The callousness of the bullying perpetrated against her one summery afternoon won’t go unpunished but will place the victim in a conundrum fluctuating between guilt and a warranted desire for retribution.

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.

In the early moments of Carey Williams’ “Emergency,” you might think that you’re in a one crazy night movie you’ve seen before. You know the kind: a long night of partying and various drunken confrontations between friends, concluded with a serene moral and emotional parting where everywhere grows up a little.

In May 1948, after the controversial approval of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, war broke out between Arab and Jewish factions in the region. The conflict began due to claims over the same land.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic“What would you do if you had six months left to live?” asks the doctor who diagnoses a do-nothing bureaucrat with terminal cancer in “Ikiru,” a 1952 masterpiece I suspect precious few of those who see its English-language remake, “Living,” will recall. Quite unlike anything else in Akira Kurosawa’s career, “Ikiru” ranks among the Japanese director’s best: With no samurai battles or set-pieces, the low-key contemporary melodrama raises profound questions about how we choose to spend the limited time we’re afforded, focusing on a stoic functionary about whom even the narrator apologizes, “He might as well be a corpse.”Culturally specific as so much of “Ikiru” may be, its lessons translate quite well to midcentury British society, courtesy of Nobel-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who did the work of adapting it to 1953 London for director Oliver Hermanus (“Moffie”).

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.

“There is no timeline to figuring this out,” Jane tells her best friend Lucy in Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne’s directorial debut feature film “AM I OK?” This is a film for late bloomers of any kind but will resonate particularly with anyone who came into their sexual identity later in life. Screenwriter Lauren Pomerantz (“Me, Myself and I”) took inspiration from her own late in life, coming out and close relationship with her best friend, producer Jessica Elbaum (“Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” “Hustlers”).

Bookended by a near-identical juxtaposition of sound and fury, directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom” starts and ends like a messy, wannabe Jules Dassin cityscape film seen through a grunge filter. “Manhattan crowds with their turbulent musical chorus, Manhattan faces, and eyes, forever for me,” our narrator reads as we see riotous anger take to the streets.

“I’d rather have one person dance in my car than have 100 people with the song on in the background” late-night radio DJ, Naz (Naz Kawakami), tells his friend. The young man hosts a show called “Night Drive,” on 90.1 FM Honolulu, “the show that makes you feel cool when you’re driving at night, the show where you actually are as you speed down the freeway going about your misdeeds.” Beginning production in November 2020 as a sort of documentary/fiction hybrid, native Hawaiian filmmaker Alika Tengan’s “Every Day In Kaimukī,” is an admirable and well-intended debut, though it’s far more successful in its vibe than it is in establishing an artistic voice with command over narrative.