‘Thelma’ Review: Lifelong Character Actor June Squibb Lands a Leading Role … in an Unlikely Action Movie

As you probably know from this weekend, director/producer Matthew Vaughn is a very chatty man whe’llo reveal quite a few secrets. He already teased that he won’t direct his “Kick-Ass” reboot, but he does have a cast and director seemingly all set and he also revealed that “Deadpool 3” scares him a little bit because it has ideas similar to his “Kick-Ass” movie idea, hmmm.

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.

Sundance Film Festival’s lineups can often be dark affairs with edgy shocks, narcotics and strident political talking points. But one of the most soul-satisfying movies to premiere at the 2024 edition features no drug dealers, whistleblowers or bloodbaths. It’s about a sweet 93-year-old grandma who collects marbles and rides a mobility scooter.And, OK, yes she also holds a man at gunpoint.Running time: 97 minutes.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer The 2024 Sundance Film Festival Awards are underway in Park City, Utah, where a new crop of indies will do battle across multiple categories, including the coveted U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize.

EXCLUSIVE: DeskPop Entertainment has acquired filmmaker Thomas Walton’s 1980s-inspired slasher Camp Pleasant Lake. DeskPop has set the pic for a release in select theaters and VOD on February 27.

EXCLUSIVE: In a lucrative pact, Amazon MGM Studios has landed U.S. theatrical rights to Levon’s Trade, with Prime Video taking streaming rights in a slew of major international territories, we can reveal.

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.

Ginnifer Goodwin played the role of Snow White on the ABC series Once Upon a Time for seven seasons and now she’s weighing in on Disney’s upcoming live-action remake.

Russell Crowe, Chris Evans, Jennifer Lopez and Mel Gibson are among the acting nominees for the 44th edition of the tongue-in-cheek ceremony, which will take place in Los Angeles on March 9, the night before the Oscars.The most nominated film this year is Expend4bles, the fourth instalment of the action franchise starring Jason Statham and Sylvester Stallone, with seven nominations, including Worst Picture, Worst Director and Worst Supporting Actor for Stallone.Horror revival The Exorcist: Believer received four nominations, as did Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, both also up for Worst Picture. That category is rounded out by shark thriller Meg 2: The Trench and DC Extended Universe film Shazam! Fury of the Gods.Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania also picked up four nominations, including Worst Director and Worst Supporting Actor for both Michael Douglas and Bill Murray.Crowe is nominated for his role in The Pope’s Exorcist, while Evans’ turn in Ghosted also earned him a nod, alongside his co-star Ana de Armas.

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.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It takes some time to fall in love with 18-year-old Elliott (Maisy Stella) in “My Old Ass.” She’s young and self-involved, so focused on heading off to college in the big city that she’s kind of a jerk to everyone around her (especially her small-town cranberry-farming family). Maybe young adult audiences won’t think so. Canadian actor-turned-auteur Megan Park’s sweetly insightful coming-of-age comedy is intended for them — whereas adults might not have so much patience for the way Stella’s impulsive character takes for granted what are arguably her best years.

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.

Swiss film producers and financiers Karl Spoerri and Viviana Vezzani have been Sundance regulars for more than 15 years, but this edition is special.

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 Hailing from the country that gave us such grim social critics as Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl (fittingly, the latter serves as a producer here), Vantablack Austrian satire “Veni Vidi Vici” opens with a senseless homicide. It’s a startling scene, no less upsetting than the Scorpio killing that kick-starts “Dirty Harry” — except that in this case, the incident is calibrated as the darkest sort of comedy.

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.