Star power makes all the difference  in THE SKELETON TWINS.  Craig Johnson’s dramedy (written with Mark Heyman) takes place in fairly commonplace territory, especially at Sundance:  siblings bound together, whether they like it or not, by embittered love and old family scars.  What isn’t expected, though, is for those roles to be filled by SNL alumni Kristen […]

  AMERICAN ANIMALS (no distrib):  It’s not easy to come up with a new spin on the venerable heist movie genre, but writer/director Bart Layton has managed just that with American Animals.  Layton had been until now a documentarian, and here he intercuts between his dramatized version of a real life robbery in which four […]

  A year ago, the idea of a “virtual film festival” would have seemed extremely far-fetched, but it’s become a regular practice in pandemic times.  The latest festival to take this path is Sundance, which in some ways is well-suited for this new normal, since it’s less built around starry galas than others.  (And there’s […]

  SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DYING:  The Office, for depressives.  Fran (Daisy Ridley) is the most anonymous member of a nondescript shipping department in a small Oregon town, wrapped in so many layers of emotional insulation that she can’t make the smallest of small talk and flees from any interaction with her officemates.  When Robert […]

> Like any showbiz stripper, the Sundance Film Festival has left its most notable revelations for last:  after releasing its Competition Entries and its Midnight and Other Fringe Titles, today the Festival announced its highest-profile Premiere films, both scripted and documentary.  They seem a bit lower-key than usual this year, with stars and filmmakers notable […]

  But for one unfortunately critical element, Logan and Noah Miller’s SWEETWATER (the brothers rewrote a script originally by Andrew McKenzie) is a highly enjoyable darkly comic western, as subsumed in stylized movie traditions (and their subversion) as a Tarantino movie, but without Tarantino’s post-modern stew of references. Sweetwater is your basic frontier town, half-way to Santa […]

  I AM MOTHER (no distrib):  Grant Sputore’s impressively controlled first feature brings us back to the post-apocalypse.  In Michael Lloyd Green’s script, it appears as though the only surviving remnant of humanity is an unnamed girl (Clara Rugaard as a teen) raised from a fetus by a maternal robot (voiced by Rose Byrne).  Mother […]

  ON THE COUNT OF THREE:  There was a well-deserved Sundance screenwriting prize for Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch’s script for Jerrod Carmichael’s big-screen directing debut, which threads an almost impossible needle as a comedy about suicidal depression.  (In an unintentional way, the film is a companion piece to the festival’s How It Ends, also […]