Sundance Review: Getting Through Life and COVID with ‘Stress Positions’

By Abe Friedtanzer

John Early in "Stress Positions"

Since March 2020, a number of films and TV series have addressed the life-altering COVID-19 pandemic in their storylines. Often it’s fodder for comedy, since looking back at people furiously wiping down groceries and staying far, far apart from each other can be humorous in retrospect. In some cases, it’s just an extra obstacle to make life a little bit harder and more complicated. In filmmaker Theda Hammel’s feature debut, Stress Positions, staying afloat in a chaotic and isolating time is a considerable challenge for its memorable characters.

John Early stars as Terry, a recently divorced Brooklyn resident watching over his nineteen-year-old nephew from Morocco, Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), as he recovers from an accident...

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Sundance Review: Tracing the History of the Police in ‘Power’

By Abe Friedtanzer 

Police reform is a hot-button issue, with calls from the left to "defund the police" and responses from the right that “blue lives” matter. Complicating those concepts is the fact that every American has grown up with the police as an established reality. Considering what something else could look like requires an acknowledgment that it hasn’t always been this way and perhaps shouldn’t be. Yance Ford’s documentary Power looks at the history of the police and how that’s shaped where we as a country now.

So much of present-day policing stems from racist institutions, beginning with slave catchers as the original model for police forces, which first began in Boston and quickly spread throughout the country...

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Animated Short Finalists, Ranked

by Nathaniel R

"Once Upon a Studio" brings decades of Disney together

We love animation but we know we give it short shrift here at the site. So let’s rectify that, at least in miniature during this final quiet moment before the official Oscar nominations. I've recently seen all but one of the finalists for Animated Shorts (the missing piece: I'm Hip by two-time Oscar nominee John Musker). Though no one asked, I've ranked them in ascending order of preference after the jump. It's worth mentioning that to get to the finals you've already bested nearly 100 other contenders so the overall quality is high. I say that so you aren't offended if #14 is your favourite, which it very well might be! Each person's personal rank would surely vary.

Okay, now on to the nostalgia exercizes, sentimental messages, surreal head trips, disturbing images, and slapstick antics...

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Review: "Your Fat Friend" Is a Sigh of Relief and a Necessary Reflection

by Cláudio Alves

Not to be indulging in self-pity, but I think it's fair to say that existing as a fat person in our world is a complicated affair. And I'm not talking about the physical realities of being fat. Instead, it's how people see and treat you that irks, how so much of our society is full of insidious anti-fat bias, from the doctor's office to pop culture, from total strangers to those who call themselves your friends. Social codes so often teach us to conflate fatness with moral rot, laziness, stupidity, the worst of humankind, and something worthy of disgust. Feeling unlovable, inward hate is the inevitable endpoint. What's worse is that when you try to call attention to it, you're often met with euphemistic justifications or treated as if what you're saying is nonsense.

Even those who putatively sympathize can be doing more harm than good, confusing what they feel for empathy when it's pity. Look no further than last year's The Whale, an odious work that proposed a humanizing view of fatness by reveling in its assumed tragedy. And yet, many people I respect loved it, expounding about its "merits" in ways that had me question what they must think when they gaze upon my person. Well, they were not alone, seeing as that trash won two Oscars. To them and others, I'd like to propose Jeanie Finlay's Your Fat Friend as a necessary watch. While not a perfect documentary, seeing it felt like releasing a breath I didn't know I was holding…

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Best International Film: Pakistan's "In Flames" & India's "2018"

by Cláudio Alves

Considering the Academy's general disinclination to honor horror cinema, it's always surprising when the genre pops up amid Best International Film submissions. This year, Pakistan is one of the brave countries that didn't let genre bias stop them from selecting a scary movie for the Oscar race. Zarrar Kahn's In Flames is the lucky flick, a Canadian-produced meditation on grief, trauma, and poisonous patriarchy bound to unnerve viewers. Neighboring nation India didn't dip their toes into nightmare cinema but sent a disaster picture that's horrifying in its own way. Juan Anthany Joseph's 2018 dramatizes a real-life catastrophe that befell the state of Kerala…

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