(this article closes our 2022 coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) This has been a very good year for films at the Sundance Film Festival for works by actors or actresses who have changed my opinion on their abilities. With the smart satire “When You’re Finished Saving the World,” actor Jesse Eisenberg has found his true calling, as writer and director.

The film’s excellent title attests to

2016 is starting to shape up as the year of the love letter to Hollywood’s Golden Age. We started the year with the Coen Brothers's "Hail Caesar!," a kidnapping comedy set in a fictional fifties studio with million-dollar mermaids, crooning cowboys and blacklisted commie screenwriters. Still to come is Damien Chazelle’s musical "La La Land" with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Stuck in the middle is Woody Allen’s

The Cannes Festival opened today with the best possible film it could open with: the buoyant and lighthearted “Cafe Society,” directed by Woody Allen. I walked out of this morning’s screening with my spirits raised. But, then became quickly hungry for lunch. In Allen’s perfectly-told, jaunty tale a young man, played by Jesse Eisenberg, moves to L.A. from New York to find work. He meets the boss’s secretary and falls in love with her

David Foster Wallace is the much-celebrated author of the one thousand-page plus novel “Infinite Jest.” Not an easy read. But then, neither is “Ulysses,” or “Gravity’s Rainbow,” George Perec’s “Life: a User’s Manual” nor any number of boundary-blowing, epoch-making masterpieces that we crack open from time to time and know we will read some day. “Infinite Jest” I’d already given up on and picked up again several times.

Kelly Reichardt likes uncomplicated. As early as when “Wendy and Lucy” came out her films have testified to her ultra-sharp minimalism and efficiency. “Night Moves,” a genre film in which three environmentalists (they're David Koresh league, but for the tree-hugger set) conspire together to blow up a dam follows the same ethos of subtlety. In lieu and place of a psychological drama about eco-terrorism Reichardt ventures

Woody Allen continues his European wandering, this time taking on four stories centered around love, infidelity and fame and set in beautiful Rome, la bella città. Only the narrative is so slight and the comedy so unfunny that "To Rome with love" quickly grows tiresome. This is the first time that Allen has gone in front of the camera in a while and it helps because he gives himself all the jokes that actually hit the mark. In "To Rome" he plays

Coming off of The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg slides way down the food chain. He plays a pizza driver caught up in a murder plot hatched by the nincompoop son of a lottery winner (Danny McBride) who wants to live the American dream of opening a tanning store that doubles as a brothel. To pay for a professional hit, his accomplice locks a bomb vest on the pizza boy's body to force him to rob a bank, which drags in a friendly teacher

I know I’m supposed to get out and help push. […]