Sundance 2021 is a Wrap

by Nathaniel R

CODA was the big winner at Sundance and sold for an extravagant amount of money.

Thank you to Jason, Abe, Murtada, and Eurocheese for their coverage of the traditionally snowy but now virtual and room temperature Sundance Film Festival which wrapped on Wednesday. In case you missed any of the reviews here they all are in one place. As with ALL Sundance film festivals, some of these picture will fade quickly from awareness, others will be talked about incessantly upon release, and still others might strangely go into hiding for a year and all but forgotten before being rediscovered when they get a streaming deal or some such in the not so near future. But which ones? It all depends on the vagaries of distribution, media and public reaction, and future awards play. For example at the 2020 Sundance Awards Minari and I Carry You With Me (both on my top ten list for 2020) were both multiple winners but only Minari seems to have any heat going into the Oscar nominations while I Carry You With Me just kind of sat out awards season despite a qualifying week in virtual cinemas and now won't be released until May 21st, 2021 (sigh) one and a half years after its high profile success at Sundance. 

Our complete list of reviews plus all the Sundance 2021 winners are after the jump...

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Sundance: "Passing" review

by Jason Adams

I hope that after fifteen years of me writing on the internet you all will have an inkling of what a big deal it is for me to start a film review off with talk of Awards, a subject I normally pay very little attention to. Perhaps it's that this is my first Sundance -- I've heard people get exclamatory brains in these places, although it being virtual this year I don't have the excuse of the mountain's thin oxygen supply. But here's the deal -- if every single person involved with Rebecca Hall's directorial debut Passing isn't nominated for awards next season I'll eat my shoe. Hell I'll eat one of Ruth Negga's shoes, and they look complicated. Buckles and snaps. But seriously. Everybody gets an Oscar. Do they have Oscars for Craft Services? Give them an Oscar. They kept these geniuses fed well enough to make this beautiful, blessed film...

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Putting the Genre in Gender at Sundance

by Jason Adams

A lot of ink, possibly pink, has already been spilled on this year's Sundance marking a flashpoint for female filmmakers. (You can find the same sort of headlines if you look back at last year's fest, which included Eliza Hittman's Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Kirsten Johnson's Dick Johnson is Dead, and Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman.) Still, women's voices at this year's fest feel dominant in a way I'm not sure they ever have before, and it strikes me that the ways we're seeing women re-working genre as a tool of dissembling trauma and male-dominance is in particular fascinating, especially as the Trump years come to their ignominious, death-rattling end...

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Sundance: The Best Way to Go Out in “How It Ends”

By Abe Friedtanzer

It’s been quite revealing to see how the film and television industries have responded to the limitations imposed by stringent regulations during the pandemic. We saw a few shows like Connecting… and Social Distance, the Coastal Elites special, and radically different release strategies from studios and streamers. What excites me most is the way that filmmakers have used new approaches to create stories that don’t directly reference what’s going on now in the world but try something innovative instead. To best illustrate this, let’s look at How It Ends, the new collaboration between Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein, who were last at Sundance with White Rabbit in 2018.

It’s the end of the world – a comet is headed towards Earth and so there’s literally going to be no tomorrow...

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Sundance Review: Ailey

by Murtada Elfadl

Like Summer of Soul, Ailey tells the story of Black art through testimonials from the artists who lived through it. In this case the story of pioneering dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey. He was only 27 years old when he founded what would eventually become one of the most renowned dance companies in the world; the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater...

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