Sundance 2021: Last News

A sun-flared and bong-addled tumble into a teenage Texan summer rife with bombshells and boyfriend problems, “Cusp,” from debut directors Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt is one of those fractal-style documentaries, in which any given sliver contains all the colors and contours of the whole. The opening is a case in point: Long-haired girls lounge on a swing in the park, scoffing, wriggling, idly shooting the shit – it could be any year from any of the last five or six decades, except for the phones they glance at every now and then.

It’s remarkably rare that anyone makes a hand-drawn animated feature for adults, let alone one as strikingly surreal and seriously minded as Dash Shaw’s “Cryptozoo.” READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated 2021 Sundance Film Festival Premieres This Sundance premiere – honored with the fest’s Innovator Award in its NEXT section for “pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling” – takes place in an alt-history 1960s secretly populated by “cryptids,” including fantastic beasts like the Kraken, the Loch Ness monster, and Sasquatch.

What does dismantling the American carceral state look like? How can meaningful and radical police reform actually be enacted? After years of tireless work by activists, acting upon decades of injustice against the poor and People of Color, these issues of now part of mainstream political platforms. On a federal level, President Joe Biden’s recent executive order to phase out the use of private, for-profit prisons is a clear indication of how far things have come….and how much further they need to go.

Reinventing a popular monster myth is central to Sean Ellis’ new horror film “Eight for Silver.” In this adaptation, the creature feature points a jagged mirror back to humanity and establishes itself on Hammer’s sturdy gothic foundations. The film’s stars, Boyd Holbrook and Kelly Reilly, recently spoke to The Playlist about the Sundance selection as well as the major projects in their future.

As a child, Mendel explored the nearby forests of Michoacán, a state in Mexico, with his older brother Vicente. The trees there are filled with massive, beautiful clusters of monarch butterflies.

13-year-old Sammy Ko (Miya Cech) is a problem child. Prone to skipping class, smoking cigarettes, and mouthing off to her teachers, she’s the opposite of the meek model student Hollywood typically imagines when writing young Asian-American characters.

Freely utilizing a non-linear structure, with mixed results, Ronny Trocker’s sophomore feature, “Human Factors,” is a compelling puzzle-box, showcasing a botched home robbery from five different points-of-view, that never fully synthesizes its twisty structure with a realized narrative. Filmed with an ironic detachment that recalls the work of Michael Haneke, “Human Factors” labyrinthian time-jumps, which freely move backward and forward at a moment’s notice to disorienting results, are more interesting to unpack after the credit roll than they are to keep track of at the moment.

So Nic Cage is a bank robber sprung, naked except for a sumo-nappy, from a lengthy stint in jail by the white-hatted, black-hearted Governor (Bill Moseley) of a fake Japanese cowboy town populated exclusively by caged Geisha prostitutes, one of the favorites of whom, Bernice (Sofia Boutella, being bafflingly good again despite the material) recently escaped, so The Governor straps Cage into a leather suit rigged with explosives on the arms, neck and testicles that are primed to explode if they detect his intention to physically harm – or get turned on by – “a helpless woman,” and sends him off into a neighboring irradiated wasteland where Time doesn’t work properly and which is populated by Mad Max-style bandits, itinerant preachers,

“Write what you know.” So said Mark Twain once upon a time, or at least that’s the popular belief. One cursory look at this body of work reveals that the guy didn’t follow his own advice, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t advice worth following.

For most teens, the scariest hurdle they’ll face is asking their crush out on a first date. But on this night, for the bashful Mike (Tyson Brown), preparing for his first outing with the headstrong Kelsey (Shelby Duclos), courting is the least of his issues.

You’ve heard this tale of superstar dreams many times before. A young talent comes to Hollywood to make it in the entertainment business.

Literally opening, as the title implies, with “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet,” Argentinian director Ana Katz’s melancholic rumination on the life of Sebastian (Daniel Katz, the filmmaker’s brother), a languishing writer turned migrant worker, is a visually stunning, but oftentimes opaque experiment. Filmed in lush black and white, with animated interludes used to portray the more devastating aspects of Sebastian’s life, Katz’s film unfurls as a series of vignettes.

In the aftermath of unprecedented change, it’s anyone’s guess where the planet will be by the conclusion of the 2020s. As the globe shifts into the second year of the oncoming decade, questions regarding the future of the species have arisen, specifically concerning the ever-increasing relationship between humanity and technology.

With her frayed blonde hair and moody coal-black eye makeup, rock band singer Marian (Alessandra Messa) doesn’t immediately appear to resemble her identical twin sister. Practically a Stepford wife with her demure manner and neat brown bob, Vivian (Ani Messa) lives with her loser husband (Jake Hoffman) in the same house the sisters grew up in.

Hauling two packages home under both arms, Leonor’s (Amalia Ulman) mother María (Ale Ulman) bursts through the door of their small apartment, proclaiming she will never return Amazon purchases for her again. Her daughter isn’t home.

You are being watched. In the era of facial recognition, targeted advertising, and social media, the threat of an omnipresent eye on the average human has passed.

Something like a documentary “Inception” with a story inside of a tale that is itself part of a narrative, “Misha and the Wolves” boasts several layers, all of them fascinating. Concerned with notions of legacy, trauma, memory, and deceit, the documentary by director Sam Hobkinson juggles multiple stories, people, and time periods with seeming ease, weaving a fascinating, multi-faceted tale in a tight 85 minutes.

Sean Ellis’ “Eight for Silver” is one of those movies that starts off so well, that shows such promise, that its slow unraveling feels less like a disappointment than a betrayal. It’s a Gothic horror picture that seems to set itself up as ambitious and intelligent, only to succumb to the most tiresome tropes and lazy shortcuts of the genre’s lesser efforts.

Marion Hill’s “Ma Belle, My Beauty” opens with the kind of aural ecstasy you’d expect from a romantic drama set in the South of France: a lazily looping guitar accompanying a breathy, enchanting vocal. The scene is set – and then it immediately collapses, as the vocalist tells her accompanist, “I hate this song, I’m sorry,” and escapes their rehearsal to take a bath.

Something like a documentary “Inception” with a story inside of a tale that is itself part of a narrative, “Misha and the Wolves” boasts several layers, all of them fascinating. Concerned with notions of legacy, trauma, memory, and deceit, the documentary by director Sam Hobkinson juggles multiple stories, people, and time periods with seeming ease, weaving a fascinating, multi-faceted tale in a tight 85 minutes.

When a person watches a movie as terrible as “Mother Schmuckers,” the natural thing is to examine the seams to see if this awfulness was indeed the point. The movies that turn into this skid almost always fail because there’s no way to capture the earnest magic that resides in the “so-bad-it’s-good” cannon, much in the same way that one can either see Shoeless Joe Jackson in an Iowa cornfield, or they can’t.