Daughters is Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s odyssey documenting Patton’s program that empowers girls of incarcerated Men yields insight through the subjects themselves – carefree tweens enjoying their chance to just be kids.
18.01.2024 - 23:57 / deadline.com
Gay cinema certainly has turned a corner lately, in the wake of films as varied as Cassandro, Rustin and All of Us Strangers, stories in which the lead character’s sexuality might form a crucial part of the tapestry of the drama but isn’t the be-all and end-all. Leading the vanguard for the next generation is this confident debut from 33-year-old British-Iraqi director Amrou Al-Kadhi, a frank and emotionally honest portrait of someone who falls outside society’s boxes and steadfastly refuses to conform to them. This emphasis on the positive is sometimes counterintuitive (more on that later), but, thanks to its core cast, Layla is an engaging study of love in the pronoun era.
Layla (Bilal Hasna) is a non-binary drag queen/performance artist who lives in London, in a house they share with a bunch of like-minded queens, a sharp, ragtag bunch more prone to discussing the merits of The Human Centipede or Saw V than the latest Kylie. Layla’s makeup is perfect, but their life is in chaos; in an early scene, a Grinder pickup spots Layla’s discarded nail extensions and immediately loses interest. Like Quentin Crisp before him, Layla has a romantic yearning for the Great Dark Man — and a similar fear that he doesn’t exist. Layla feels that most gay men think of them as too effeminate and, worse, that the straight(ish) men who fall for their drag persona are just kidding themselves. “They only ever want the old-fashioned fantasy,” he says, “not the reality.”
RELATED: Sundance Unveils Packed 2024 Lineup That Includes A.I., Pedro Pascal, Kristen Stewart, Satan, Devo & Steven Yeun
Unexpectedly, while doing a performance for a fast-food company called Fork Me! (a detail so leftfield it has to be based on experience), Layla flips out
Daughters is Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s odyssey documenting Patton’s program that empowers girls of incarcerated Men yields insight through the subjects themselves – carefree tweens enjoying their chance to just be kids.
The 2024 Sundance Film Festival is almost at an end, but there are still films to screen in the online portion of the festival and, almost as importantly, awards to hand out to happy independent filmmakers. The big winners at this year’s awards ceremony were Alessandra Lacorazza’s “In the Summers” which won the Grand Jury Prize U.S.
The 2024 Sundance Film Festival is almost at an end, but there are still films to screen in the online portion of the festival and, almost as importantly, awards to hand out to happy independent filmmakers. The big winners at this year’s awards ceremony were Alessandra Lacorazza’s “In the Summers” which won the Grand Jury Prize U.S.
The 2024 Sundance Film Festival awards ceremony honoring the best of this year’s lineup in Park City is in progress right now at the Ray Theatre. Refresh frequently as the winners are announced.
In 2019, Rose Glass announced herself to the world with the phenomenal Saint Maud. The film was an immersive character study of one lonely woman clinging to sanity in the wake of a personal trauma. Audiences loved Saint Maud with a common thread across all reviews being how hard it was to believe that it was only Glass’ feature debut. This year Glass returns with her second film, Love Lies Bleeding, which just debuted at Sundance. Whereas Saint Maud made a star out of lead Morfydd Clark, Love Lies Bleeding is set to do the same for Katy O’Brian.
The Sundance Institute and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation today named the recipients of three artist grants aimed at supporting projects currently in development, as they officially bestowed their Feature Film Prize on Sam and Andy Zuchero’s Love Me, all through their joint Science-In-Film Initiative.
Pending Woody Allen’s final and absolute cancellation, few directors have emerged to take his place as an erudite and literary artist whose work combines snappy wordplay, base sex jokes and a philosophical willingness to stare into the abyss. Jesse Eisenberg staked a tentative claim to that throne with his 2022 debut When You Finish Saving the World, an amiable but scrappy political satire about a left-wing mother and son, but his follow-up makes a stronger case, being much more adult, less broadly scripted, and as depressing as Woody Allen circa Stardust Memories (which his sophomore film as director obliquely resembles, with its talk of chance, fate and irony).
An exploration of the generational trauma surrounding the “stolen generations” of Aboriginal children by the Australian government, Jon Bell’s feature debut “The Moogai” fits all the criteria of what we would, perhaps pejoratively, describe as “elevated horror.” A fraught term, and one that would need more than the length of this review to dive into, it nevertheless seems apt for a film that so blatantly makes its subtext into text.
Melissa Barrera hit the frontlines of a pro-Palestine rally on Sunday (January 21) in Park City, Utah.
Melissa Barrera and Indya Moore were among the several husband protestors in support of Palestine chanting “Free Palestine” and “stop the genocide” at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
Zack Sharf Digital News Director Kristen Stewart‘s domination of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival continued at the Variety Sundance Cover Party presented by United Airlines, where Stewart was honored for her starring roles in two big festival premieres: “Love Me,” a post-apocalyptic romance film in which she stars opposite Steven Yeun, and “Loves Lies Bleeding,” an A24-backed crime thriller in which she played a reclusive gym manager who falls for a local bodybuilder. “It’s hard to get here,” Stewart told Variety at the party about returning to Sundance, where she has premiered more than a dozen movies throughout her career. “Not because it’s an established and elite film festival, but because it supports marginalized voices.
Jena Malone is opening up about Kristen Stewart.
Love Lies Bleeding is an intense, queer, unconventional love story between two unstable people. Directed and written by English filmmaker Rose Glass, and starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Ed Harris, Dave Franco, Jena Malone, and Anna Baryshinkov, the film explores the destructive nature of relationships marked by strong performances and a visually arresting narrative.
Kristen Stewart is one of the coolest stars in Hollywood, but even she still gets nervous when she heads to the red carpet.
In the realm of zombie-themed films, a genre often filled with clichés and predictable plot lines, Handling the Undead aims to stand out as something different.
Saoirse Ronan is stepping out to promote her new movie.
Anyone with more than a passing interest in the weird and wonderful will have seen, if not heard of, the Patterson-Gimlin footage, the cryptoozological equivalent of the Zapruder film. Shot in 1967 in the forests of Northern Carolina, it purports to show a large, ape-like creature with an elongated forehead striding purposefully into the trees. Unlike an ape, the creature walks upright, and, unlike the furtive behavior of any other forest creature, it has the casual air of the average human being popping over to the 7-11 to pick up a gallon of milk. Most people who see the footage wonder what the hell this damn thing is, but the sibling directors of Sasquatch Sunset have a couple more questions that they’d like answered. Like, where is it going? And what does it do all day?
Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic On the most literal level, Sam and Andy Zuchero’s “Love Me” is about the relationship between a buoy adrift at sea and a satellite circling the earth. The eccentric rom-com takes place in a time after humans have gone extinct, when the surviving machines’ only references are a massive hard drive’s worth of data combed from search engines and social media sites.
PARK CITY – Whatever your thoughts on Sam and Andy Zuchero’s “Love Me” few will dispute that for an independently financed film it’s a unique and creative achievement. At least a third of the movie is CG animation, another third is motion capture animation, and the final portion is live action.
Set in a post-human world, Love Me, directed and written by Sam and Amy Zuchero and starring Steven Yeun and Kristen Stewart, unfolds as an unconventional love story between two inanimate objects. These entities stumble upon each other in the digital realm and, through the remnants of human knowledge, adopt new identities in hopes of evolving their relationship.