Every Sundance review on Silver Screen Riot.
Archival footage reveals a city in flux, swelling amidst years of demonstrations and unrest across Glasgow, Ireland. History falls like dominoes through the flicker of old newscasts. Hope, growth, loss, and resistance all swirling in the streets. On Eid Mubarak 2021, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, immigration enforcement shows up on Kenmure Street,...
A profoundly upsetting documentary, Sentient explores the multitudinous horrors of the animal testing infrastructure—not just the physical, psychological, and spiritual toll on the animals, but the damage done to the human technicians, scientists, and doctors complicit in the process, all underpinned by science that may not be as solid as it claims to be. Centered...
When 11-year-old Iris’ absentee father, Aris, slinks back into town for his father’s funeral in their sleepy Greek fishing village, she tracks him down to an abandoned shipyard and tries to wedge herself into his pathetic little life. In writer-director Myrsini Aristidou’s Greek-language Hold Onto Me (Κράτα Με), this relationship, performed beautifully by Christos Passalis...
Anna may be an adult, but her cognitive impairment (unspecified in the film, though decidedly on the autism spectrum) means she requires close care from her adoptive parents. The issue is that they’re now elderly and ailing themselves, hardly ideal caretakers. When Anna’s mother dies unexpectedly, her care falls to her father (Victor Slezak), who...
On August 11, 2023, police in Marion, Kansas, a town where “everyone knows everyone” isn’t just a saying, it’s civic policy, raided the offices of the Marion County Record. They seized computers, phones, and personal devices, even searched the homes of the paper’s staff. A day later, 98-year-old newspaper co-owner Joan Meyer died. Her doctor...
Tell Me Everything unfolds like a memory. Or a bad dream that has grown nostalgic with time. From its oversaturated aesthetic to the buoyant Israeli disco influences and gaudy ’80s production design, writer-director Moshe Rosenthal’s Hebrew-language film is soaked in the specificity of time and place. It hopscotches through timelines in Tel Aviv to tell...
An extremely wealthy benefactor decides to buy up a plot of land and provide housing for a small faction of self-proclaimed communists in Alford, Massachusetts in the powerful, provocative, and infuriating documentary from Sinéad O’Shea, All About the Money. Her film begins with what should be a startling statistic—that the top 1% of Americans own...
Shame and Money, writer-director Visar Morina’s pastoral-then-metropolitan slice-of-life drama from the landlocked Eastern European Republic of Kosovo, interrogates what’s left when a family’s livelihood collapses and they’re forced to fend for themselves in a new environment. For Shaban’s hardworking family, upheaval begins when their untrustworthy brother steals the family cow. Their routine of livestock tending,...
Now in theaters: Big Girls Don’t Cry is playing in select U.S. theaters as of October 9, 2026, and opens in UK and Irish cinemas on November 27. It won the Grand Prix at Biarritz’s Nouvelles Vagues festival. Originally reviewed at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. We meet 14-year-old Sid Bookman (Ani Palmer) in a...
Historically, men would duel to the death when their reputations were tarnished, but international human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson argues that “too many men were dying that way, so they introduced defamation laws.” This was supposed to be a more civilized method—allow legal practitioners to decide what is and is not true regarding reputation and...