
Sundance: Wrapping the Fest
My Sundance pace finally caught up with me, knocking me pretty much flat for a couple days, but here’s the last bit of my Sundance coverage this year. For me, this year was what my great-grandma would have called a “fair to middlin’” sort of Sundance. In other words, there were plenty of films that…
Read the full article »Sundance Docs Roundup: Detropia, Queen of Versailles, and Ethel
Detropia Sundance vets Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing were back this year with Detropia, a look at a city that’s gone from being the fastest growing city in the US to one of the most rapidly declining. Detropia has a palpable opinion about its subject matter (Ewing grew up just outside Detroit), and the filmmaker’s…
Read the full article »Sundance Review: Safety Not Guaranteed
One of the biggest surprises of this year’s Sundance is just how terrific Safety Not Guaranteed, Colin Trevorrow’s film based on a real Craigslist ad seeking a companion for time travel, turned out to be. The film’s quirky premise, which sends three magazine employees to investigate whether the man who placed the ad really thinks…
Read the full article »Sundance Review: Goats
There’s a good deal to like in Goats, a coming-of-age tale adapted by Mark Jude Poirier off his own 2001, semi-autobiographical novel, and helmed by first-time feature director Christopher Neil (nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, cousin of Sophia Coppola). The film focuses on Ellis Whitman (Graham Phillips), a 14-year-old kid, wise and responsible beyond his…
Read the full article »Sundance Review: For Ellen
So Yong Kim (In Between Days, Treeless Mountain) is back at Sundance this year with For Ellen, a quiet, meticulously paced character study about Joby (Paul Dano), a would-be rock star , who takes a road trip back to the small midwest town where his soon-to-be ex and young daughter live so that he can…
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