Sundance Film Festival Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

be him. Benji blurts out totally inappropriate comments that other people could never get away with.

PARK CITY – There are multiple meanings to the title of Jesse Eisenberg’s latest directorial effort, “A Real Pain.” There is the pain that cousins Benji Kaplan (Eisenberg) and David Kaplan (Keiran Culkin) are experiencing over the passing of their beloved grandmother and there is the pain Benji is feeling over a horrifying incident in his cousin’s life. The most pressing example, however, is in David’s soul.

Titus Kaphar’s luminous directorial debut, “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” featuring another electrifying turn by the always-captivating André Holland, begins with a James Baldwin quote. “If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.” READ MORE: Sundance 2024: The 23 Most Anticipated Movies To Watch It’s a bruising quote, given the context of the personal and aching movie, a superbly incandescent but wrenching tale of generational pain, inexcusable parental mistakes, the legacy of family trauma, and, at its core, a broken father/son relationship.

Kobi Libii’s work on the sadly short-lived Comedy Central show “The Opposition with Jordan Klepper” always tended toward the confrontational. By donning the guise of right-wing media provocateurs, he highlighted the absurd internal contradictions of ideological hardliners.

David Schwimmer has never been known for his movies. Perusing the “Friends” star’s film resume is quick — and painful. There’s “Six Days Seven Nights,” “The Laundromat” and “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted,” among other screen non-classics.But the actor’s undeniable charisma and uniqueness are finally put to proper full-length use in the demented “Little Death,” which has its world premiere Friday night at the Sundance Film Festival.

There’s commitment to the bit, and then there’s David and Nathan Zellner. The brothers’ latest film “Sasquatch Sunset,” billed to Sundance audiences as only “a year in the life of a singular family,” makes good on the filmmaking duo’s long desire to make a film about the legend of Bigfoot.

Early in Yance Ford’s visual essay “Power,” he tells the audience that the film to come either requires “curiosity” or  “at least suspicion” from the viewer. It’s the type of bold claim that might pack a punch as a rhetorical hook, especially for a documentary that dives into the cultural, social, economic, and political history of policing in the United States.

“The Greatest Night In Pop” is so entertaining and eminently watchable, and it’s as simple as that. Directed by Bao Nguyen, the acclaimed filmmaker of the Bruce Lee doc “Be Water,” the already-engaging subject matter doesn’t hurt: nearly 50 of the top American music artists in the world all in one room, recording a soon-to-be global hit single.

PARK CITY – To suggest that director Jack Bergert and co-screenwriter Dani Goffstein are playing with fire with the first act of their feature film debuts is an understatement of massive proportions. We haven’t walked out of a movie at a major film festival since before the pandemic, but if we weren’t assigned to review “Little Death” we might have.

Seemingly not wasting one of its 111 offbeat minutes, sprawling and long for a comedy, but not undeserved here, Nate Silver’s “Between The Temples” begins with immediate hilarity. Ben Gottlieb (a terrific Jason Schwartzman) is a sad sack cantor living at home.

Within minutes following the opening fade-in of “Gaucho Gaucho,” a trio of individuals can be seen dashing across a barren landscape, each sitting astride their own majestic-looking horse bathed in a sea of black and white with a South American backdrop beautifully framing the moment. It’s an appropriate setup to this documentary about gauchos, the colloquialism used to describe Argentinian cowboys and cowgirls, as the 84-minute runtime serves as little more than an exercise in striking photography mixed with a series of vignettes that’s as slice of life as one’s likely to find.

It all seems so idyllic at first and sensible, too. Mother of four Maria Gros Vatne narrates the opening minutes of “A New Kind of Wilderness” as the documentary shows videos and still photographs of her husband and kids romping through Norway’s unassuming fields, streams, and woods.

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.

lifeless “Captain Marvel,” their latest movie has, um, flecks of the supernatural heroism and urban vigilante justice that we associate with the comic book genre. Running time: 106 minutes. Rated R (strong bloody violence, language throughout including slurs, sexual content and drug use).However, unlike many of those bland caped behemoths, “Freaky Tales,” which had its world premiere Thursday night at the Sundance Film Festival, also boasts enough forceful, nerdy personality to fill the San Francisco Bay.

“These are the tales, the freaky tales,” repeatedly intones Oakland rap legend Too $hort over the interstitials of writer and directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s “Freaky Tales.” This Bay Area anthology film takes its title from the over nine-minute song, which is itself an extended chronicle of prominent personalities the rapper encounters. While the directing duo occasionally approximates something wild in their headrush of 1987 nostalgia, they do not earn the second line of the rap.

died of an accidental overdose last July. He was 25.His “Freaky Tales” co-star Jay Ellis took the stage of the Eccles Theater after the debut screening and recalled filming the finale fight scene with him.“My first day, as we went to go do the work at the house, I got to meet Pedro [Pascal], I got to meet Ben Mendelsohn and I got to meet Angus Cloud,” the actor said onstage, flanked by Pascal and Mendelsohn.“Rest in peace to Angus,” added Ellis, who plays Golden State Warrior Sleepy Floyd.

When is an aspiring sociopolitical satire so exasperated with what it’s supposedly lampooning that its anger and indignation threaten to undermine the irony of what it’s trying to ridicule? Directed by Austrian pair Daniel Hoesl and Julia Nieman, their Sahara dry, deadpan social satire, “Veni Vidi Vici” (Latin for “I came; I saw; I conquered”)— about the untouchable nature of the rich and powerful of the world, and how consequences for their actions have largely vanished — isn’t necessarily that film.

the Hollywood Reporter.The outlet added that the project centers around a grieving son who received a dying request from his late mother.“The film is about lost objects and lonely people and forgiveness and regret, but I also think it works hard to uncover where tenderness and closeness can exist in those things,” Malia revealed in an interview about the project.“We hope you enjoy the film and it makes you feel a bit less lonely, or at least reminds you not to forget about the people who are.”The film was previously screened at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado back in Sept. 2023, as well as the Chicago International Film Festival in Oct.

Steeped in what its audience might deem mature mythology, “The Pink Opaque,” a fantasy show aimed at teen audiences, comes on at 10:30 PM on the Young Adult Network every Saturday. Unfortunately for Owen (first played by Ian Foreman), a meek mixed-race middle school boy growing up in the 1990s, that’s past his strict bedtime.

PARK CITY – Are you ready for a 93-year-old action hero? No, we’re not referring to whatever movie or television show Sylvester Stallone is working on at the moment (he’s also just a spry 77, by the way). We’re talking about one of the most unlikely heroes of all portrayed by none other than June Squibb.

PARK CITY – It’s 2024. Are you ready for a movie set in the pandemic summer of 2020? Or, like September 11th, another historical event that was hard for Americans to stomach on screen for a good while, do you need a decade or so to process? Your answer to those questions will likely, for better or worse, determine your opinion of Theda Hammel’s “Stress Positions” which debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

PARK CITY – Sometimes the star of the movie isn’t the cast or the director. It’s not the cinematography or the score.

There’s an odd tension and dichotomy coursing throughout the new documentary, “Frida,” an intimacy meets a standard-issue form: a lyrical, magical quality next to something just maybe too safely chronological for its own good. Carla Gutierrez’s new documentary, her directorial debut, is well-meaning and has a clear devotion and affection for her subject, the legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, but as a primarily told cradle-to-grave story, it is doggedly linear and therefore often feels a little familiar.

PARK CITY – Trend alert: drag queen movies might just be the not new thing in the contemporary indie film world. And as a fan of both the visual arts of cinema and drag performance, we certainly aren’t complaining.

The 2024 Sundance Film Festival is right around the corner and kicks off later this week. And one of the titles on our Sundance 2024: The 23 Most Anticipated Movies To Watch feature is “Suncoast.” The directorial debut of actor turned writer/director Laura Chinn, “Suncoast,” is semi-biographical and is based on the filmmaker’s personal teenage experience growing up in St.

Alright, it’s January. There is no rest for the wicked, and it’s that time of year again.

You may not remember, but Ethiopia’s 1983–1985 famine prompted many musical artists to take humanitarian action. First, there was Band-Aid, formed by Bob Geldolf and all the U.K.

The 2024 Sundance Film Festival is right around the corner and that means it’s time to finalize guests and, most importantly, jurors. The festival has a long tradition of honoring its multiple competition slates and over the years has recruited jurors such as Jane Campion, Sarah Polley, Edgar Wright, Jon Hamm, Darren Aronofsky, Quentin Tarantino, Parker Posey, and even RuPaul Charles.

A new trailer has landed for the upcoming horror-thriller Piggy. The film originally premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival back in January but will start to appear in cinemas stateside very soon.With the summer sun beating down on her rural Spanish town, Sara hides away in her parent’s butcher shop.

Sundance is celebrating its 40th Anniversary next month and the festival has revealed more programming to highlight its cinematic legacy. Topping the list of events are new 4K restorations of “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Go Fish,” “Three Seasons,” and an extended version of “DIG!,” with over 30 minutes of new footage, retitled “DIG!XX.” Additionally, there will be screenings of “The Babadook,” and “Pariah” as well as restorations of “Mississippi Masala” and “The Times of Harvey Milk.” READ MORE: Sundance 2024: New works from Steven Sodergh, Debra Granik, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck and more Alumni always have a home to return to in Park City and 2024 will be no exception.