The first three days of 2022 Sundance have yielded a good crop of films in the competition slate. 

Over the weekend two genre films were shown, each one making their mark with inventive individuality.

Writer/director Andrew Semans’ “Resurrection” is an unnerving thriller starring Rebecca Hall as Margaret, a single mother and

Directed by Christian Tafdrup and co-written with his brother Mads, “Speak No Evil” is a film where the kindness of strangers is something that should be sidestepped, as two families (one Danish, one Dutch) learn after meeting on holiday.

Premiering as part of the festival’s “Midnight Selection” category, this is director Tagdrup’s first film (after two tries) to be

“What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.”

Filmmaker Kogonada’s “After Yang” was selected as part of the Sundance Film Festival’s “Best of the Fest.” These are films that are chosen to make their Sundance premiere even as they may have already been shown at another festival. In this case, “After Yang” premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival

Writer/Director Michael Polish has created an intriguing ten-episode series that’s modern Western with a philosophical edge that made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.

There is a lead character surrounded by death. Revenge. Pistols. Blood. The whole piece exists as a visual representation of a quote from “Once Upon a Time in America”, “People like that have something inside... something to do

“We live and die by the stories we tell each other,” is the line that begins writer/director Jonathan Nossiter’s latest piece, the exquisite “Last Words.”

Adapted from a novel by Santiago Amigorena (he also co-wrote the screenplay), Nossiter’s film follows Kal (newcomer Kalipha Touray), the last human on the face of the Earth. The year is 2085. One year earlier he was

In the wake of the recent DOC NYC 2002 is heating up with some amazing documentaries. Whether available on demand on one of the major players or otherwise, these docs do what the best of the genre do: observe and uncover truth. "Life of Crime 1984-2020" (director: Jon Alpert) Jon Alpert has made the most extraordinary documentary of the year, which is only fitting

2021 was a much stronger year for cinema than 2020, creativity and originality both made a comeback. Sure, Hollywood overwhelmed us with too many big budget money grabs and there is always some type of comic book adaptation playing somewhere, but directors of weight made a welcome return. It made my cinema-loving heart glad to see films from Jane Campion, Paul Schrader, Pedro Almodovar, Steven Soderbergh, Clint Eastwood

Despite our most fervent hopes, 2021 was the second strange year for both cinema and the world. Festivals were either online or continued a hybrid format (Slamdance just announced that due to omicron, they will be online only in January), and that communal feeling we have missed being in theaters together has only partially returned. All this to say it was a most unusual twelve months—again.

The Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s film “There Is No Evil” (Golden Bear Award, Berlin Festival, 2021) is extraordinary on a number of levels—political daring in a country where dissent or criticism is harshly punished, as well as narrative. Four chapters or stories, unrelated, maintain throughout a profound tension, not with special effects or major reveals but by dint of taking us deep into what a brutal regime does to its people and how these

Jon Alpert had been working on his documentary for so long, he had to transfer footage from videotape. Using a digital process known as “TerraNexing,” Alpert’s eighties and nineties footage was renewed on the 16:9 aspect ratio.

What couldn’t be sanitized was the horror of the nation’s drug epidemic, which Alpert shows us in microcosm in “Life of Crime