Sundance
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Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 6: Madeline’s Madeline, Of Fathers and Sons, A Futile and Stupid Gesture, The Price of Everything
Context is everything — I’m writing this final Sundance dispatch at a remove of a day/continent from Park City, back in NYC, with a day’s pause between marathon-writing while reconsidering the chronological melange of what I saw and what, if any, narrative can be extrapolated about this year’s fest. My feeling, overall, is of a weak year, despite having (per usual) missed some of what appear to be the standout titles (Mandy, alas), which framed my response to Madeline’s Madeline, the last film I saw there. Is this a great movie? With a day to think about it, I’m not sure […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 25, 2018 -
Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 5: Matangi/Maya/M.I.A., Skate Kitchen
During its many years of gestation, the only thing known about Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. was that it was a beyond-troubled production. In 2012, director Steve Loveridge wrote that he’d “rather die” than finish the profile of the musician/his friend since college; as of last March, M.I.A.’s official position was that she hadn’t spoken to Loveridge — a friend of hers since art school — “in years” and had no idea what, if anything, was happening with the film. Whatever was going on in the background of those statements, a finished film has emerged, both director and subject were there for its premiere, and the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 23, 2018 -
Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 4: Eighth Grade, Shirkers, Piercing
I suppose I should lead with Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, one of the fest’s breakouts or something along those lines — it arrived as an A24 production with Scott Rudin as one of the producers, so clearly people were going to be curious. The title is basically the movie: in her last week of middle school hell, awkward Kayla (Elsie Fisher) — voted by her otherwise indifferent classmates as most quiet — fumbles through a cool kids’ pool party she shouldn’t be at. Kayla shadows a high school senior and is invited to hang out with her crew. That temporary boost […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 22, 2018 -
Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 3: Crime + Punishment, Monsters and Men, Bisbee ’17
I’ve written before about my fondness for local news: “a fun, seemingly randomized mash-up of crimes caught on security cameras, traffic and weather updates, forced banter, cooking segments, deep concerns about marijuana use and ‘reporting’ that’s thinly veiled support for the NYPD.” One segment in the latter mode still regularly replays in my mind: following the 2014 shooting of two NYPD officers, one channel — playing to that unflappable demographic which believes the police are always in the right — aired a particularly shameless segment in which a reporter found a seven-year-old black child to tearfully state how much he […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 21, 2018 -
Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 2: Clara’s Ghost, Hale County This Morning, This Evening
For the second consecutive year, Sundance showed an Academy-ratio film with Ghost in the title, but Bridey Elliott’s feature directorial debut Clara’s Ghost is decidedly not A Ghost Story. Bridey stars along with father Chris, sister Abby and mom Paula (the only non-actor in the bunch, though she easily holds her own). The plot’s loose: sisters Riley (Bridey) and Julie (Abby) — former child stars as the Olsen-esque Reynolds sisters — come for a one-night visit home. Father Ted (Chris) has just lost his casting in a show being put together by Julie’s fiance and is feeling rancorous. Some magazine photographers come over to take […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 20, 2018 -
Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 1: Our New President, Three Identical Strangers
Two things shape my Sundance coverage this year — one purely personal, the other macro. The personal was recently reading Christian Metz’s Film Language, the kind of text normally consumed in undergrad cinema studies (not my major) but belatedly a worthwhile book all the same; I wanted some new tools to think about movies, and this fit the bill. The opening essays are recognizably Barthes-ian contemplations of i.e. what makes the moving image more plausible than a still image and the middle gets mired in a lot of precise definitions of paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic, but the finale is a surprisingly fiery, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 19, 2018 -
Hits and Misses: Anthony Kaufman Surveys the Sundance Class of ’17
The headlines said it all: “Hollywood Faces August Death March,” “Bummer Summer” and “Beleaguered Box Office.” OK, Hollywood had a tough year, but does that necessarily apply to independent films? Well, as the saying goes, a receding tide sinks all boats. And so it was in 2017: If people were going out to fewer movies and streaming more episodic content at home, it affected both indie films and tentpoles. But if we look back at the films that premiered at Sundance 2017, there are a few instances to inspire hope: The Big Sick, of course, was the big one; Wind […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Dec 14, 2017
