Sundance Review: 'The Accidental Getaway Driver' swerves beautifully toward slowness

by Jason Adams

Blessedly patient with its could’ve been wacky and wild premise, writer-director Sing J. Lee’s The Accidental Getaway Driver opts to be a methodical mood piece. This based-on-a-true-story tale is about an elderly Vietnamese driver named Long (Hiep Tran Nghia) who takes the wrong phone call at the wrong time and gets dragged into a crime-drama he has no place being in the middle of. You can see the 90s Jackie Chan high-concept version of this story staring in, but Lee’s film aims for and hits something much deeper. Something that speaks to assimilation and generational divides in hushed tones, and with a genuine tension that remains unshowy at every turn. I loved it...

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Sundance: 'Eileen' is the movie 'Carol' couldn't be

by Jason Adams

The blonde woman in expensive clothes explodes into the dowdy brunette’s life like fireworks. She just appears one day, flung out of space, and nothing will ever be the same for the Plain Jane working girl again. Everything is upended in Midcentury America, surprise feelings warming in the brunette's belly she doesn’t even have a name for, inspiring a sudden need to run. And yes you’d be forgiven if you thought I was speaking about Carol, Todd Hayne’s 2015 masterpiece about a love affair between Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, who no matter what Harge says were not ugly people. 

No I speak of a different lesbian potboiler that just popped off at Sundance this year, director William “Lady Macbeth” Oldroyd’s Eileen, based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2015 novel...

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Sundance: Penélope Cruz and Luana Giuliani are Radiant in ‘L’Immensità’

By Abe Friedtanzer

People who don’t fit a particular mold have existed since long before society had a label for them. Poor mental health was often assigned as a reason that someone might not be “normal,” an unfortunate part of history that still persists in many places today. L’Immensità, which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last fall (here’s Elisa’s take) and now arrives in North America at another major film festival, is a colorful portrait of a trans teenager misunderstood by just about everyone around him, and his loving mother, who also struggles to be taken seriously when she seeks to find joy in her life despite her abusive marriage...

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César Nominations: "L'Innocent" leads and David Fincher will receive the Honorary César

by Arnaud Trouvé

Louis Garrel & Noémi Merlant in "L'Innocent", the nomination leader

The 48th César awards have released their list of nominations, and guess what? Just like the Oscars, an oddball family comedy leads with 11 nominations, including nearly the same acting breakdown (1 lead, 2 Supporting Actress, 1 Supporting Actor). L'Innocent is nowhere near as eccentric as Everything Everywhere All at Once, but it's a pleasant heist movie and the first box-office hit for director Louis Garrel (who also stars, his biggest hits in the US have been Greta Gerwig's Little Women and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers).

I mentioned L'Innocent's box-office on purpose given that French cinema is having an existential crisis: for the first time in decades, no national production managed to crack our yearly top 10 box-office...

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Doc Corner: Surprise Nominee, 'A House Made of Splinters'

By Glenn Dunks

I wasn’t expecting to have to review this movie so early. Until little more than a week before the 85^th Academy Awards, Simon Lereng Wilmont’s film about Ukrainian children didn’t even have an American distribution deal. PBS and POV swooped in just in time, acquiring the rights to a film that nobody had on their predictions and yet ultimately landed a surprise nomination for Best Documentary Feature alongside more recognised titles All That Breathes, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Fire of Love and Navalny (all titles we have looked at over the last year).

The movie had of course been on my radar for a while. Wilmont’s previous film, The Distant Barking of Dogs, was one of the great documentaries of the 2010s. A House Made of Splinters doesn’t quite reach the five-star heights of that one, because it has less of a laser focus. But it’s a beautiful, aching story and it is definitely not just making up the numbers on the Academy’s five.

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