Sundance Review: The Climb

by Murtada Elfadl

The Climb starts with a literal climb. Best friends Kyle (Kyle Marvin) and Mike (Michael Angelo Covino) are biking somewhere in France, up a mountain talking about Kyle impending nuptials where Mike is going to be the best man. The scene builds up as they bike up and ends with the revelation that Mike slept with Kyle's fiancée. The deadpan way Covina reveals that and the funny yet completely heartbreaking way Marvin reacts sets the tone for this abrasive comedy of male friendship...

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Sundance: The wondrous poetry of "Summertime"

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

Carlos Lopez Estrada, the director, with the cast of "Summertime" at Sundance

When Blindspotting premiered at Sundance on the opening night of the 2018 festival, the word was that two hundred ticket holders were turned away. They scheduled other screenings (where I saw the film), but it was clear that music video director Carlos López Estrada had something important to say that people wanted to hear. Just two years later, Estrada is back at Sundance opening the festival with his second feature…

In his first film, Estrada’s partner was Broadway star Daveed Diggs. This time he's working with twenty-seven spoken word artists, mostly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six...

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Review: Weathering with You

By Tim

Makoto Shinkai, the Japanese animation director whose new film Weathering with You opens this weekend in the US, has honed in on a few particular aesthetic preoccupations with laserlike intensity over the years. One of these is rain and the way that each droplet catches and reflects the diffuse light of a cloudy day; one is the brilliance of sunbeams piercing their way into shady areas, with fuzzy, dusty edges blurring the difference between light and dark; one is the way that riding in trains forces a lateral flatness onto the perception of the rider, transforming landscapes into planes of action moving across each other. He also favors stories about the extreme emotional states of teenagers, starting with but not limited to youthful romantic passion, and these stories tend to end in lopsided sentimentality expressed with as much unsatisfying contrivance as a decent filmmaker would dare throw into an otherwise satisfying screenplay.

Weathering with You, comes with a scenario that has been created with the apparent goal of specifically enabling him to chase every one of those things as far as a person possibly could. It's about a near-future Tokyo where it's always raining, and a teen girl who has the ability to create localized pockets of rainless sunshine...

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International Contenders: Estonia's "Truth and Justice"

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

When someone is young, the future can be full of hope. There is endless time to truly build something, and, if it’s difficult to get a dream off the ground right away, there may be other opportunities and options down the road. Working toward a goal, however, requires some sort of anchoring to the present so that a person doesn’t become too bogged down in the lack of progress and isn’t ever able to appreciate what it is they have on the way there. If eyes are only on the future, those who have spent every moment working may feel as if they’ve missed their entire lives once they actually stop to take it all in.

In Truth or Justice, Estonia’s finalist for Best International Feature this year, Andres (Priit Loog) buys a large farm and moves there with his wife Krõõt (Maiken Schmidt). He soon meets his neighbor Pearu (Priit Võigemast), an alcoholic who has already driven away two previous owners with his dishonest tactics...

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Best Animated Feature Contenders: "Ne Zha"

by Tim

Thus far in this round-up of 2019's animated features, we've been focusing on Oscar hopefuls and the more artsy side of animation. This week's subject, Ne Zha, is neither of those things, but in its own way, this is still as significant as any other film we've looked at. This is a blockbuster of the first order: the second-highest-grossing Chinese film in history (and the second-highest-grossing film made in a language other than English), with the highest single-territory gross for any animated film ever made. And even though stories about the Chinese box office always have to come with an asterisk attached (those numbers are often cooked a bit, especially when records are in play), that is by any means enough of a big deal that it's more than a little frustrating that essentially nobody in the United States has heard about any of this.

Ne Zha is a film the Chinese animation industry has been working towards for a long time. Along with the rest of Chinese cinema, animation has spent most of the last decade looking to beat Hollywood at its own game, providing the kind of opulent spectacle that for a long time was the exclusive domain of big-budget American filmmaking...

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