‘My Old Ass’ Review: Always-Welcome Aubrey Plaza Pops in From the Future in YA Crowd-Pleaser

Ethan Shanfeld “The Color Purple” will make its streaming debut on Max on Feb. 16.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic The winner of the World Dramatic competition at Sundance, co-directors Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s understated and essential Mexican drama “Sujo” is one of two films in this year’s lineup (the other being “Ponyboi”) in which children who were given distinctive names by doomed macho dads spend years wondering what those monikers mean. In both cases, the eventual reveal puts a poignant coda on stories of young Latinos struggling to escape the cycle of ignorance and unhealthy behavior that threatens to pull them under.

EXCLUSIVE: In another big Sundance deal upwards of $15 million, Amazon MGM is in final negotiations to acquire the Sundance buzz title My Old Ass. This was a hotly contested deal that today had several suitors in the mix for a crowd pleasing coming of age film that has garnered strong reviews and reaction since it launched in the Premieres category on January 20 at the Eccles Theatre.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Depending on how you look at it, “Ponyboi” is either a Trojan horse for exploring nonbinary gender identity or a hackneyed crime movie with a radically unorthodox queer protagonist. Either way, it’s a sordid yet stylish showcase for intersex actor (and activist) River Gallo, who uses “they/them” pronouns and sees the project as an opportunity to educate audiences about the social and psychological aspects of exhibiting both male and female traits in a world that classifies people in one box or the other.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Whoopi Goldberg is an Oscars legend, having won an Academy Award for “Ghost” and hosted the ceremony four times and served as an Academy board member. So perhaps moviegoers might want to listen to Goldberg when she says there are no such thing as Oscar snubs amid the uproar over Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie missing out on nominations for best director and best actress, respectively, at the 2024 Oscars. “Barbie” earned a total of eight nominations, including best picture, and Gerwig is a nominee for screenwriting and so is Robbie as one of the film’s producers.

Ethan Coen’s first feature-length narrative feature outside of work with his brother Joel Coen isn’t even out yet (“Drive-Away Dolls”), but the filmmaker is already charting his next movie. The dark comedy, “Honey Don’t!,” will star Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, and Chris Evans.

EXCLUSIVE: Ahead of Focus Features‘ February 23rd release of Drive-Away Dolls, the road-trip caper marking her first collaboration with Academy Award winner Ethan Coen, Margaret Qualley has been set to star in Honey Don’t!, the filmmaker’s latest for the same studio.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Norman Jewison made movies that mattered. “Timing is everything,” the director told me, the one time we met. I’d been enlisted to host a long Q&A with Jewison at the American Cinematheque — and I was more than a little intimidated.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Will Ferrell has some pretty cool friends. That shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise to his fans.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Here we are, three weeks into January, and the Sundance Film Festival has delivered what promises to be the year’s most uncomfortable date movie: a grubby New York-set fable about a facially distinctive actor (modeled on Adam Pearson) who undergoes an experimental procedure that leaves him looking like Sebastian Stan — presumably an improvement, until he realizes that under the skin, he’s still the same miserable loser. The kind of oddball satire only indie studio A24 would dare to produce, Aaron Schimberg’s “A Different Man” asks what it means to be “normal,” and whether, if we could wave a magic wand and “correct” those qualities that set us apart, that’s really something we’d want.

Percy Hynes White stepped out for the premiere of his new movie My Old Ass held during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival at Eccles Theatre on Saturday (January ) in Park City, Utah.

PARK CITY – Coming up with a new twist for a teen movie ain’t easy. There have been so many over the decades that someone has likely already tried it.

more minutes.” Not once, until I saw “My Old Ass,” which premiered Saturday night at the Sundance Film Festival.Director Megan Park’s otherwise dreamy teen romance flick with a time-travel twist was chugging along quite sublimely, and then it abruptly stopped like someone cut power to the building.Without giving too much away, my hunch is that writer-director Park ended her film, which is produced by Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap, the way she did in order to avoid being lumped in with a particularly tired young-adult sub-genre. Running time: 88 minutes. Not yet rated.That’s the right idea.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic The U.S. government decided to make an example of Reality Winner, giving the former NSA translator a five-year prison sentence. So it’s only fair that director Susanna Fogel should be able to make an example of her, too — only this time, to very different ends.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Presence,” a ghost story directed by Steven Soderbergh, is set entirely inside a lovely, renovated, 100-year-old suburban home, and before the characters even have a chance to move in, the place is already occupied. The camera literally seems to be peering at things, staring out the second-floor windows, then coming down the stairs to witness the arrival of a harried real-estate agent, then the family of four she’s about to sell the house to. Darting from room to room in an unbroken wide-angle-lens shot, the camera gives us an impromptu tour of the house, letting us drink in the crisp mint-green walls, the vintage wood that lines everything (windows, doors, stairway, fireplace), the ancient smoke-glass mirror and polished oak-board floors and elegant sprawling kitchen.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Austin-based indie directors David and Nathan Zellner have spent more time thinking about Sasquatch than most filmmakers do musing about human beings. In 2011, they brought “Sasquatch Birth Journal 2” to the Sundance Film Festival, a four-minute faux nature documentary in which a hirsute creature can be seen giving birth to an equally furry infant.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Writer-director Sean Wang is tough on himself in “Dìdi,” a fresh and funny summer-before-freshman-year flashback that provides an Asian American angle on that Sundanciest of indie-film genres: the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age movie. In what feels like a cross between Bing Liu’s “Minding the Gap” and Jonah Hill’s “mid90s” — courtesy of the young director’s teenage desire to make skate videos — Wang serves up some of his most wince-inducing adolescent memories, from an aborted first kiss to the realization that he’d been trying to downplay his Taiwanese heritage.

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.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Taking a one-for-us victory lap after one-for-them studio smash “Captain Marvel,” indie duo Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden blow a big, self-indulgent kiss to the late-’80s East Bay with “Freaky Tales.” Berkeley-born Fleck was all of 10 years old in early 1987, when this nostalgia-fueled anthology film is set, which explains the wide-eyed way he romanticizes the defining subcultures of the time (with Boden presumably doing her best to broaden the film’s incredibly specific, “you had to be there“ appeal). In four distinct but intertwining chapters — populated mostly with fresh faces, plus grizzled-but-gorgeous Pedro Pascal — “Freaky Tales” melds wildly different sectors of the city: There’s the rowdy-yet-respectful Gilman Street punk crowd; the revolutionary Oakland hip-hop scene (including Too $hort, whose raunchy rap anthem gives the film its name); the Warriors’ historic victory over the Lakers, in which local basketball legend Eric “Sleepy” Jones scored a record-setting 29 points in the fourth quarter; and a disturbing spike in neo-Nazi-linked hate crimes, which strangely serves to tie everything else together.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic If Ann Landers had it right, and hanging on to resentment amounts to letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head, then “Your Monster” is what happens when you kick open the door and let those feelings run amok. Drawing from personal experience, writer-director Caroline Lindy delivers a clumsy metaphor of a movie, in which a promising young actor named Laura Franco (“In the Heights” star Melissa Barrera) has her Broadway dreams derailed by a cancer diagnosis, only to discover a ferocious inner strength, courtesy of the beastly creature she finds hanging around her childhood home.