Sundance: Rebecca Hall goes bugsh*t in the unhinged 'Resurrection'

by Jason Adams

Wanna know how you're in the hands of a smart filmmaker? Well there are two signs, and funny enough they both involve Rebecca Hall. The first sign is thatthey hire Rebecca Hall. That's as smart as it gets! They do that much you know you're in good hands. The second sign is they give Rebecca Hall a five minute centerpiece monologue to deliver and they hold the camera on Rebecca Hall's face the entire time without cutting. That right there is what the movies were invented for, and that's how you know that Andrew Seman's film Resurrection, fresh outta Sundance, is worth its weight in Tim Roth's discarded teeth. What? Isn't that how you measure weight? I sure do now, anyway...

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Sundance: It's Doubled-Trouble for Karen Gillan in 'Dual'

by Jason Adams

I suppose it's less of a theoretical question now than it was a few decades ago, but what would it mean for us if human cloning becomes a reality? It's a topic science-fiction has wrestled with for ages, but having just spent two years weathering my first global pandemic by basically Netflix-and-chilling it I'm prone to think our grand high sci-fi authors might've overblown our reactions to such epochal events. (I mean... we barely reacted to that news about UFOs, for god's sake.) And so I'm now prone to believe that human cloning would be met with something closer to the meh, shrug, move-on that The Art of Self-Defense director Riley Stearns' crafts with his slyly mundane sci-fi parable Dual, just premiering at Sundance...

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Sundance: More ‘I Love Lucy’ with ‘Lucy and Desi’

By Abe Friedtanzer

 Have you noticed that, when there’s a major scripted film about a real person from history, there’s often a documentary to go along with it at the same time? One of the very first articles I wrote for this site was about RBG and On the Basis of Sex, where the former was clearly the superior product. Recently, Being the Ricardos opened in theaters and then quickly to Amazon Prime. The movie looks at a (fictionalized) tempestuous week for the TV power couple. The documentary on the same couple, from director Amy Poehler, zooms out to look at their entire story, offering a good amount of added context.

This film’s title gives away its focus, which is that the lives of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were so intertwined, even after they were no longer married, that it’s impossible to truly separate them...

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Sundance: 'The Janes' Brings Context to Modern Women’s Struggles

by Eurocheese

"The Janes" are a popular topic at the Sundance Film Festival this year, and given the way women’s rights are under attack in the US today, their story remains relevant. Earlier in the festival, the fictional Call Jane highlighted one woman’s story when she became involved with this group. In The Janes, documentarians Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes show the real women who lived this history, detailing the backstory of this group and showing us what a future with restricted women’s rights might look like...

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Interview: Fran Kranz on His Directorial Debut, ‘Mass’

By Abe Friedtanzer

In the middle of this second virtual Sundance, I was fortunate to be able to revisit one of the highlights of the first virtual edition which is now eligible for awards consideration: Mass. It’s been troubling to see that, despite initial early buzz for the film and for its cast, particularly Ann Dowd, it’s missed out at a number of important precursors, including that SAG Cast nomination that should have been... 

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