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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Meet the New Honorary Oscar Winners!

by Cláudio Alves

On Saturday, November 28th, at this year's Governors Awards, we'll finally see the amazing Angela Bassett with an Oscar statuette befitting her talents and incredible career. After she lost the Best Supporting Actress trophy at the 95th Academy Awards, netizens everywhere decried another injustice committed against one of the most important African-American thespians working today, mourning an Oscar-less status many think should have been rectified way back in 1993. Hopefully, they feel vindicated now. Indeed, if nothing else, this proves how much the industry is behind Bassett, making one wonder how close the vote was between her and Jamie Lee Curtis...

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Sundance review: Judy Reyes and Marin Ireland give the pregnancy horror 'birth/rebirth' its juice

by Jason Adams

Let me just stop you right here, at the start, and admit that I am going to be terribly biased in this review of writer-director Laura Moss’ horror film birth/rebirth. Why? Do I know the director? Have I played ping pong with the cinematographer? Did the boom mic operator donate a kidney to my mum? No no nothing like that – it’s just the entirely sane fact that I love love love the actress Judy Reyes with all of my being and seeing her be given a leading role in a movie is too much for me to bear, qualitatively speaking. 

Here at The Film Experience, within this safe space of actressexuals, I know I can admit this freely. But I just feel an upfront warning is due...

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Sundance review: Eliza Scanlen proves ecstatic anew in 'The Starling Girl'

by Jason Adams

Usually when I write about getting “representation” on-screen I’m talking about the gay stuff – like when Call Me By Your Name knocked me flat with its warmly lyrical depiction of a neurotic gayling’s first same-sex longings. And there was gay stuff at Sundance this year that I felt deep in my bones – the darkly funny internalized homophobia of Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun squarely hit the mark.  But no movie felt more like a mirror at this year’s fest than did writer-director Laurel Parmet’s debut film The Starling Girl, which explores the world of rural Christian fundamentalism with the crystal cold precision of one who barely survived that very thing. I speak from my own experience...

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