‘My Old School’ Review: An Entertaining, Inventive Doc Undercut By Its Self-Indulgent Silliness [Sundance]

John Mayer announced on Thursday that he has tested positive for COVID-19, leading to the postponement of four shows.The singer, 44, who battled the virus earlier this year, took to Instagram to announce the unfortunate news.'Whelp. More members of the band tested positive for Covid today, and I was one of them,' he said.

After selling their Las Vegas mansion for a cool $13.5 million on Thursday, Gene Simmons and Shannon Tweed stocked up on groceries.The 72-year-old KISS frontman and his 64-year-old wife were spotted getting groceries at Erewhon Supermarket in Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon.Their outing came just after it was reported that they found a buyer for their Las Vegas mansion, to the tune of $13.5 million. Stocking up:After selling their Las Vegas mansion for a cool $13.5 million on Thursday, Gene Simmons and Shannon Tweed stocked up on groceriesSimmons was sporting a black t-shirt under a black hoodie with a plain black baseball cap.He also stayed safe amid the COVID-19 pandemic with a black face mask covering his mouth and nose, while he walked to his vehicle.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaRoadside Attractions has acquired U.S. distribution rights to “Call Jane,” a historical drama about a group of women working to provide access to safe abortions.The film debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, premiering at a time when the Supreme Court is debating Roe v.

What do you have to say to the Russian people in the event of your death? Filmmaker Daniel Roher (“Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band,”) asks his subject, political Russian dissident, Alexei Navalny, at the beginning of his engrossing new doc “Navalny.” “C’mon,” Navalny scoffs, dismissively, as if highly attuned to Roher’s “gotcha” question he could frame posthumously in the case of the political agitator’s untimely death.

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.

TikTok is an undeniable force in our society. It has the power to launch music careers, house the homeless, and unite people worldwide.

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.

A dreamlike exploration of toxic masculinity, new motherhood, and sexual awakening, Quebecois actor-director Monia Chokri debuted her second feature, “Babysitter,” at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. While it’s unclear what “Babysitter” is actually trying to say — or even what its characters learn over the course of its plot — the film is so thoroughly sardonic that it gleefully resists any deeper meaning.

The crushing weight of debt and the stress of financial struggle have led many to find creative problem-solving methods. The Sundance crime drama “Emily The Criminal” explores one such story about a character pressed to the limits by a system intent on keeping her in the loop of student debt and marginalized job opportunities.

If you’ve never been to Sundance before, you can expect a lot of fresh features from oft-marginalized directors and — at least these days — films shot with square aspect ratios. “Girl Picture,” a delightful, Finnish coming-of-age tale by the director Alli Haapasalo, fulfills both criteria.

Filmmaker Jamie Dack is no stranger to film festivals. Her short film about teenage malaise in suburban Southern California “Palm Trees and Power Lines” premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival as a Cinéfondatio selection.

debuted at Sundance this week, unravels Lee’s bizarre story with actor Alan Cumming sitting in for the man himself by lip-syncing to Lee’s narration (Lee agreed to tell his story, but didn’t want to appear on camera). Director Jono McLeod, who knew Lee as a fellow student, tells the tale via interviews with his now-50-something classmates, animated sequences and snippets of old video. Cumming, who was originally attached to star in a now-defunct feature adaptation of the story, remembers the saga as a news bombshell in Scotland.

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.

student at his old school is the subject of an upcoming film.Brian MacKinnon, who attended Bearsden Academy, twice, is profiled in the upcoming feature, 'My Old School'.The 58-year-old will be portrayed by Alan Cumming for his second stint at the Academy, where the then-30-year-old posed as a kid named Brandon Lee.Lee's made-up backstory says his mum died in a car crash, prompting him to be sent to live with his grandma in Scotland.MacKinnon had already studied at the school in the 1970s, achieving grades that let him study medicine at Glasgow University.He failed the exams twice and dropped out of the course but had a change of heart a decade later. It was at this point that he had the idea of starting fresh at Bearsden Academy.Surprisingly, he succeeded, and kept the ruse going for two years when he obtained five grade-A highers, a glowing reference and a place on the medicine studies course at Dundee University.But his true identity was outed in 1995, with his story splashed across national newspapers across the country.Jono McLeod, who went to school with MacKinnon, is set to direct the film.For all the latest Daily Star news, sign up for one of our free newsletters here.Featuring an interview with MacKinnon, who did not want to appear on camera, the film relies on Cumming lip-syncing the tale of Lee's days at Bearsden Academy.In a promotional video for the film, McLeod said: "My Old School is all about my old school - that's Bearsden Academy - the high school in a fairly well-to-do suburb of Glasgow, Scotland."The film combines live action interviews with my former classmates and two teachers alongside animated re-enactments."In 1993 when we were 16 years old, my classmates and I welcomed a new kid.

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.