Fred Topel Comedies can be hard to come by at Sundance. There’s always a Clerks or two but most filmmakers come to Sundance with their serious dramas. Not Augustine Frizzell. Her comedy, Never Goin’ Back, premiered in the Midnight section of Sundance, usually reserved for ultra-violent horror movies. It was good for a late night laugh. Jessie
As the cast of Hamilton continues to dominate other media, Daveed Diggs proves he is a movie star in his Sundance film Blindspotting. Lin-Manuel Miranda got a head start composing songs for Moana, but Diggs did some music for TV’s The Mayor, and now cowrote this role to showcase his acting chops, social commentary and
Music movies have been a boon for Sundance in recent years. In 2014, the fest opened with Whiplash and closed with Rudderless. Sing Street also had a Sundance premiere, and last year featured Patti Cake$ and Roxanne Roxanne. Hearts Beat Loud got stuck in my head so I can’t wait until the film and its
If you expect a movie starring the Elliott family and directed by Bridey Elliott to be a wacky laugh riot, then you really aren’t familiar with the truly weird Elliott creations. Sure, they’ve been on SNL and Silicon Valley, but the ones Chris Elliott wrote and created were Get a Life and Cabin Boy. His
After 10 years of acting, Carlson Young had a story she just wanted to tell herself. The star of MTV’s Scream TV series and Groundhog Day sex comedy Premature, Young wrote, directed and starred in the short The Blazing World which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. In The Blazing World, Young plays Margaret, a
Last year’s Hostiles showed the brutality of the western frontier in a way that’s never been portrayed on film before. Damsel is not that. Robert Pattinson stars as a cowboy totally not cut out for the old west. Sam Alabaster (Pattinson) comes looking for his fiance to be Penelope (Mia Wasikoswa). He hires a preacher,
A Futile and Stupid Gesture is still a David Wain movie even though it’s a biography. It’s fitting since it’s the biography of a satirist, so Wain finds self-referential ways to tell the story of National Lampoon founder Doug Kenney. The film begins with Doug as an old man (Martin Mull) calling out biopic tropes.
One of my favorite things to watch is survivors exploring abandoned wastelands for supplies. Will Smith was the ultimate in I Am Legend. I Think We’re Alone Now gives us Peter Dinklage and Elle Fanning as legends. Del (Dinklage) is the lone survivor in a town, going from house to house grabbing useful items and
There have been a few movies set on a computer screen before. Unfriended and Open Windows made it work but Search is the first movie where you don’t even notice it’s all on a computer screen. It’s just so organic to the way we use devices that it just feels like a regular movie, and
The Long Dumb Road is the long awaited starring role for Jason Mantzoukas, by me at least. Mantzoukas totally delivers as a compelling leading man with heart and tough love. Nat (Tony Revolori) is driving from Texas to Los Angeles for college. His car breaks down and Richard (Mantzoukas) is able to fix it, so