Critics' Conversation: Dazzling Docs and Diverse Voices Lift Sundance 2020

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg addressed his lack of support from minorities when he stopped by The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Friday. "I think it's got to begin with humility.

An immersive political documentary that might be useful as a glass half-full/half-empty personality test, Ramona S.

Lyrical and provocative,Acasă, My Homebrings an intimate slant to age-old questions about the value of conformity, the pleasures and challenges of the natural world versus the comforts and distractions of modernity, and the amorphous but essential matter of what constitutes a good life.

The way religious law penetrates every aspect of Iranian life, from a murder case to how a TV show is run, is probably the most striking aspect of Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness. The perverse logic of temporary marriage, inheritance laws favoring boys and homicide laws stacked against wives, not to mention the practice of paying one’s way out of a hanging with “bloody money” to the victim’s relatives, become casual plot elements in this well-shot, cleverly scripted melodrama.

“Giving Voice” has won the Festival Favorite Award, selected by audience votes from the 128 features screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

By Patrick Hipes

Andy Samberg time-loop comedy “Palm Springs” broke sales records (by the cheeky sum of 69¢), and “Taylor Swift: Miss Americana” inspired a mini mob scene at an otherwise star-starved Sundance. But in the end, the film that defined the 2020 edition of America’s most important indie-movie showcase was a #MeToo revenge thriller called “Promising Young Woman.”

Giving Voice is an invigorating look at African American playwright August Wilson’s legacy through the eyes of a cohort of hopeful young theater students across the country. This talented group of high school students compete in the 2018 August Wilson Monologue Competition by performing a monologue of their choice from one of Wilson’s ten plays — each play focuses on one decade of twentieth-century black life — and the doc introduces us to six of the students in the competition.

Netflix seriously raised the bar on the true-crime police procedural with Unbelievable, its shattering, forensically detailed miniseries about the hunt for a serial rapist. That standard of excellence does no favors to this poorly scripted feature from the streaming platform, based on the unsolved Long Island Serial Killer case in which more than a dozen sex workers were murdered over a period of almost 20 years.

Playing a security worker (like a TSA agent) at London's Stansted airport whose simmering mental unease finally comes to a rolling boil one day, Ben Whishaw contributes a scalding performance in Surge.This feature debut for director Aneil Karia, who has directed episodes of edgier TV shows such as Top Boy and Pure in the U.K., grew out of an earlier collaboration between Karia, Whishaw and movement coach Laura Williamson Biggson, the short filmBeat.

An early scene in the first season of The Trade, director Matthew Heineman's docuseries about cross-border crime and its consequences, sums up the voyeuristic appeal — and seediness — of its immersive approach. A young addict named Brittany buys heroin over the phone while telling the documentary crew in her motel room mid-tears that it's been a month since she's seen her children.

Everyone has a favorite book that we long to see adapted into a film so more people will know about the book and read it too. At the same time, we also dread the filmmakers will ruin it by misrepresenting or diluting the essence of what makes that book so special.For many people living with autism, their most beloved tome on the subject is The Reason I Jump.

It's easy to see why documentary and TV director Andrew Cohn's first narrative feature, The Last Shift, was at one time considered as a project for Alexander Payne, who remains on board as executive producer. Empathy for aging men navigating complicated crossroads in their unfulfilled lives has often shaped Payne's films and very much applies to the terminal under-achiever played here with characteristic dimension and heart by the ever-reliable Richard Jenkins.

If you're of a certain age and lack a certain sort of culinary discretion, chances are good that you remember the experience of playing McDonald's Monopoly game in the 1990s, the thrill of winning the periodic free fries or drinks, mixed with the excitement of getting exactly one piece away from a bigger prize.

By Brandon Choe

Writer-director Michael Almereyda is an idiosyncratic storyteller with an affinity for brainy radicals and the work of forward-thinking scientific minds, most recently in Experimenter and Marjorie Prime.

In her feature-length debut Farewell Amor, Ekwa Msangi explores the meaning of home for an Angolan immigrant family newly reunited in New York City after almost two decades apart.According to the United Nations, the United States currently hosts 51 million international migrants (about 19 percent of the world’s population), the largest number of any country in the world.

Anyone who saw director Louise Osmond's 2015 documentary Dark Horse, winner of the audience award at Sundance that year, knew it was a racing certainty that this almost-too-good-to-be-true story would get made into a feature film someday.

Like a wiry groundhog in biking shorts, Lance Armstrong likes to periodically poke his head out of his hole, offer a few utterances of the truth and then retreat for another six months (or several years) of obfuscation or delusion.It's perhaps the most underrated upside of having spent decades lying to absolutely everybody about nearly everything: that you can similarly turn the truth-telling process into a multiyear adventure.The latest chapter in Lance Armstrong's confessional journey is

Settling in to watch a Steve James documentary can be like taking your place at a 15-course prix fixe dinner from a master chef.