Every Sundance review on Silver Screen Riot.
Frank (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is up for parole soon, serving a long sentence in a maximum security prison. Years ago, he killed a man, but now considers himself changed. We’re not so convinced. Yes, Frank can be patient and carries himself with a calm stillness, but there’s a rage inside him that boils over when no...
This is not a story of extinction. If Cocaine Bear (also “based on a true story”) gives us a deranged cautionary tale about mankind’s reckless interference with animal instincts, Nuisance Bear offers the quieter, more unsettling counterpoint: what happens when animals start showing up in human spaces not out of curiosity, but desperation.
It’s the job of parents to keep kids safe. But that doesn’t mean safety is ever really within their control. Josephine, written, directed, and produced by Beth de Araújo, and winner of both the Sundance Jury and Audience Awards, is a thoroughly depressing, feel bad film about what happens when that illusion of control is...
Brother and sister Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O’Rourke) have been living alone on the isolated, windswept Auk Isle off the coast of Scotland for 30 years. Entirely self-reliant, they spend their days hunting and gathering, swapping feverish tales of mainland threats, and preparing for phantom invaders. This translates to things like netting seagulls...
During Ghost Month, the boundary between the living and the dead is supposed to thin. The gates of hell open up. The ghosts get hungrier. Or so says Gracie’s Nai Nai (Fiona Fu), who delivers this unsettling tidbit with the weary authority of someone who’s seen some things. For Gracie’s family, this bit of folklore...
Now available at home: The Weight is available to rent or buy on digital (Apple TV, Amazon and Fandango at Home) as of October 20, 2026. Originally reviewed at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. In the midst of the Great Depression, Samuel Murphy, played by the ever-reliable Ethan Hawke, is separated from his daughter and...
Aaron (Cooper Raiff) is having a tough time of it. His little sister, Leah (Kaitlyn Dever), his best friend and, maybe, his soul mate (in the completely platonic sense), has taken her own life. Though she’d wrestled with mental health issues in the past, the reality of her actually following through, of truly leaving home...
Loving married couple Haru (Rinko Kikuchi) and Luis (Damián Alcázar) have been practicing for the amateur Latin senior dance contest in director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s Ha-Chan Shake Your Booty. At home, Haru watches ballroom dance videos, studiously. Luis lovingly calms her nerves. They are prepared. They are in love. When their dance finally comes, in...
Now available at home: How to Divorce During the War is available to rent or buy on digital. Originally reviewed at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. The dissolution of a twelve-year marriage is a complicated thing, especially when you have a kid. Even moreso when you are facing the potential of impending war. Lithuanian couple...
There’s something in the air in If I Go Will They Miss Me. Planes drone overhead constantly in this lyrical, Moonlight-coded debut, a feature-length expansion of Walter Thompson-Hernández’s earlier short of the same name. Beneath them, a father and son circle each other in a jagged dance of longing, legacy, and quiet double-edged disappointment. Big...