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Sundance ‘24: ‘DÌDI’ Comes Of Age in Observant, Rude Dramedy 

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In his cringe-tastic treatise on middle school awkwardness Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham captured the universal horror of growing up through the specificity of Elsie Fisher’s Kayla. Her oily identity crisis effortlessly evoked our own transitory 13-year-old state, subjecting us to the lost-but-not-forgotten dread of first crushes, online interactions, and seething parental conflict. With Dìdi, Oscar-nominated director Sean Wang does much the same, with more of a skater-punk male juvenile delinquent edge. While the similarities are easy to identify, Dìdi stands on its own as a singular vision of coming-of-age that taps into the universality of being a total dickhead rage monster, because hormones. Read More

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Sundance ‘24: Love and Faith Collide ‘BETWEEN THE TEMPLES’ In Quirky Jewish Rom-Com

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After the sudden passing of his author wife, a Jewish cantor (Jason Schwartzman) finds himself deep in the throes of a crisis of faith that has his questioning everything from his career to his own worth. When he crosses paths with his childhood music teacher (Carol Kane), herself at a turning point in life, his misery and her meshuggah send the pair into orbit around one another. Together they decide she’ll have her long-awaited Bat Mitzvah, despite the fact that she’s in her 70s. Between Two Temples, written and directed by Nathan Silver, explores this unexpected relationship at the intersection of faith, expectation, and love, using humor and heart to examine how what makes sense on paper is rarely what the heart yearns for. Read More

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Sundance ‘24: ‘A DIFFERENT MAN’ A Darkly Comic Psychological Thriller About Abandoned Identity 

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An aspiring actor with an extreme facial deformity undergoes an experimental procedure and ends up missing out on the role of a lifetime. Things only get worse when the life he always dreamed up ends up in the hands of a rival actor, himself facially deformed. Writer-director Aaron Schimberg combines body horror with a Shakespearean-level of ironic romantic tragedy to tell a nightmarish story about one man’s journey to reshape – and ultimately undo – himself.  Read More

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Sundance ‘24: ‘LOVE LIES BLEEDING’ Is a Blood-Stained Queer Love Affair on Steroids

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Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding melds a greasy crime drama with a gritty love story, presenting an American saga steeped in steroid-fueled rage, white trash aesthetics, and memorably bad haircuts. Glass leans into B-movie intrigue with an elite level of execution, creating a visually provocative and impressively-performed world of high crimes and low sleaze and populating it with scumbags and weirdos. A followup to her excellent religious-horror debut Saint Maud, Love Lies Bleeding furthers Glass’ exploration of those on the fringes of society. In this case, it’s late-80s Nevada, a dried-up rural wasteland where the local gun club is the center of all cultural and sociopolitical activity, as well as the epicenter of its deeply-integrated criminal enterprise. Read More

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Sundance ‘24: ‘A REAL PAIN’ Interrogates The Overlap Between Individual and Family Trauma

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Kieran Culkin shines in Jesse Eisenberg’s tender sophomore feature A Real Pain. A poignant meditation on loss, grief, and family history that’s part autobiographical and entirely heartfelt, Eisenberg has seemingly found his groove as a creator interested in melding melancholic human stories with relationship-driven good humor. “Anything that I’ve written that’s good is very personal,” Eisenberg shared at the premiere and with A Real Pain, he’s excavated situations and characters from his own life and translated them into a good-natured and provocative little drama with wide-reaching appeal.  Read More

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Sundance ‘24: Buzzy and Mind-Bending ‘IT’S WHAT’S INSIDE’ Pulls Off a Terrific Magic Trick

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Eight former college friends reunite the evening before their friend’s wedding to play a heady game with far-reaching consequences. Such is the set-up for Greg Jardin’s utterly transfixing debut feature, a precisely-constructed explosion of creativity that smashes together the college reunion comedy, puzzle box thrillers, and a Shane Carruth-esque level of science-fiction precision. Skillfully paced to snatch your attention early on and never lose it for a moment, experiencing It’s What’s Inside is like watching a flawlessly executed magic trick for the very first time. Read More

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Sundance ‘24: Tortured ‘I SAW THE TV GLOW’ Reaches Through the Screen 

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Jane Schoenbrun’s audacious followup to their attention-grabbing debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is billed as a horror feature but it takes careful time developing said horror. And delivers a wallop. A quietly remarkable film, and one that spurred a handful of walkouts during its Sundance premiere, I Saw The TV Glow is not an easily accessible film. But with just a little thought, investment, and excavation, this handsomely-mounted ethereal slowburn will be sure to worm its way deep under your skin and suck you into the screen.  Read More

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Sundance ‘24: ‘FREAKY TALES’ A Disjointed Tapestry of Stories, Ideas, and Tones, with Nazis

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Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Freaky Tales, a madcap 1987 Oakland-set anthology, is a lot. Told in four loosely threaded together chapters, this interconnected story of the intersection of corruption, subculture, and violence in Reagan-era west coast America bites off more than it can chew, becoming more of an implosive collision than a meaningful exploration of much as it stretches on. As is often the case with anthological features, each individual story only feels half-baked, the germ of a story not afforded the room to grow and develop into something more. They’re connected in only the loosest of senses, making the sloppy whole certainly less than the sum of its sometimes interesting parts. Read More

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Sundance ’24: ‘HOW TO HAVE SEX’ and the Obliteration of Carefree Youth

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When three British teenage friends, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis), abscond for a weekend holiday of hard partying, thumping clubs, and fast sex, they find that their freewheeling existence is more fragile than imagined. Tara, or “Taz” when she’s in full party animal mode, is the rowdy, raunchy heart and soul of the party and the film. She has yet to lose her virginity, and her mates won’t let her forget this fact. The trio embarks on their holiday with a clear goal: to explore their sexualities, particularly Tara’s. This setup is familiar for a coming-of-age romp but How to Have Sex quickly becomes something much deeper and more penetrative. Read More

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‘THE BEEKEEPER’ Makes John Wick Look Like Walt Whitman

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Just because a movie actively acknowledges how dumb it is doesn’t make it any less so. This is the case with The Beekeeper, a low-rent John Wick knockoff that almost plays like a spoof. There’s plenty of quick-cut bloody action, a truly mind-boggling amount of references to bees and bee hive politics, and some of the worst dialogue this side of an Expendables movie. Pretty much everyone involved in the project seems to be in on the joke, hamming up the lowbrow camp when not administering decent, if unmemorable, action shoot ‘em ups, but that doesn’t make its consumption any less grueling. Read More