Sundance Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

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

Filmmakers love to use horny horror and genre metamorphosis for tales of eroticism or queer eroticism: hell, it works, and it’s often a beguiling mixture of moods, tones, and feelings in our nether regions. And that seems to be what filmmaker Jacqueline Castel is going for with “My Animal,” a surreal, erotic, romantic werewolf movie that premiered at Sundance earlier this year.

Fran Kranz’s “Mass” is likely one of the most emotionally pulverizing films ever made about America’s gun-violence epidemic – but across its 110-minute runtime, not a single shot is fired.

It’s remarkably rare that anyone makes a hand-drawn animated feature for adults, let alone one as strikingly surreal and seriously minded as Dash Shaw’s “Cryptozoo.” READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated 2021 Sundance Film Festival Premieres This Sundance premiere – honored with the fest’s Innovator Award in its NEXT section for “pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling” – takes place in an alt-history 1960s secretly populated by “cryptids,” including

Irene (Tessa Thompson) rarely passes for white. She fears for her safety too much to do so.

Female trauma’s been given a serious workout in cinema, liberally exercised in the fantasy genre of late.

S.O.S distress calls, fantasy escape from trauma, and forever wars that need to be fought all swirl together in “Mayday,” a dreamy and surreal new feminist fairy tale and revenge film that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival this week. The feature-length filmmaking debut of writer/director Karen Cinorre, “Mayday” centers on Ana, a young woman who is mysteriously transported to an otherworldly and dangerous island.

Curious is the current emphasis on women’s trauma in American genre film—the way it’s discussed online, marketed, singled out in the headlines—as if trauma were not already deeply embedded in the historical fabric of horror movies. Of course, in a time when more women filmmakers than ever are being given the opportunity to tell their stories, the rise of feminist horror should come as no surprise, especially given the #MeToo phenomenon and efforts to destigmatize mental illness.

13-year-old Sammy Ko (Miya Cech) is a problem child. Prone to skipping class, smoking cigarettes, and mouthing off to her teachers, she’s the opposite of the meek model student Hollywood typically imagines when writing young Asian-American characters.

Literally opening, as the title implies, with “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet,” Argentinian director Ana Katz’s melancholic rumination on the life of Sebastian (Daniel Katz, the filmmaker’s brother), a languishing writer turned migrant worker, is a visually stunning, but oftentimes opaque experiment. Filmed in lush black and white, with animated interludes used to portray the more devastating aspects of Sebastian’s life, Katz’s film unfurls as a series of vignettes.

Abuse leaves scars unseen but permanent in director Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s debut “Wild Indian,” a character study wrapped in larger observations on the generational effects of violence and religious guilt. In it, two men marked by a single crime lead distinctively dysfunctional lives.

With her frayed blonde hair and moody coal-black eye makeup, rock band singer Marian (Alessandra Messa) doesn’t immediately appear to resemble her identical twin sister. Practically a Stepford wife with her demure manner and neat brown bob, Vivian (Ani Messa) lives with her loser husband (Jake Hoffman) in the same house the sisters grew up in.

To call a portrait documentary an “affectionate tribute” to its lesser-known subject, is usually redundant. That’s the whole point of adoring acknowledgment docs of this ilk— “shining a brighter spotlight” on [insert criminally undervalued subject here].

“Prime Time,” initially, opens with a beguiling premise. It’s New Year’s Eve in Poland, and the world is mere hours from the year 2000, a new millennium.

Rodney Ascher’s computer-haunted documentary “A Glitch in the Matrix” is not the most insightful recent examination of boredom-born foggy Internet delusions. That honor likely goes to Arthur Jones’ antic “Feels Good Man.” Still, Ascher’s appropriately discombobulating stew of queasiness, comedy, and terror seems well-cued to the subject matter, even while missing a certain editorial sharpness that might have brought some of its notions into greater clarity.

After a renowned career of nearly four decades in both film and TV, actor Robin Wright makes a confident feature directorial debut with “Land,” screening this year as part of Sundance Film Festival’s Premieres line-up.

Irene (Tessa Thompson) rarely passes for white. She fears for her safety too much to do so.

It’s hard to say if the excoriating debut film written, produced, and directed by Fran Kranz, in being an extraordinarily depressing chamber piece dealing with the long-after fallout of a school shooting, is the last film we should have expected from the wacky “Dollhouse,” and “Cabin in the Woods” alum, or exactly the film he was always going to make, setting out his stall as a filmmaker of serious intent, to be taken seriously.

Set on the trench that divides waking reality from the subconscious, director Christopher Makoto Yogi’s moody sophomore effort “I Was a Simple Man” achieves the narrative fluidity of dreams in a multigenerational ghost tale that conflates Hawaii’s recent history with one man’s burdensome life—both in irrevocable transition.

“Black Woodstock doc,” reads the director’s clapperboard, the first image we see in the feature debut of drummer, DJ, music producer, journalist, podcaster, and wing enthusiast Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s superb documentary “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).” It’s part joke, part expression of cultural context: Playing the dual role of curator and archaeologist, Thompson presents his audience with footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival, a concert series staged

down from 118 in 2020 — as it made plans for a nearly all-virtual event from Jan. 28 to Feb.

“We call B.S.” This was the message from Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez and many of her peers. Tragically, not a whole lot changed in the two years since it was spoken.

Title photo Caption:  Viggo Mortensen, who was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in Green Book, which won Best Picture in 2019, has made his directorial debut in Falling.  The movie made its world premiere at Sundance 2020.  Photo:  Getty Images North America

(photo above: Director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese of This is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection (3rd left) at Sundance. Photo: Getty Images North America. 

PARK CITY, Utah — What do “Reservoir Dogs,” “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Clerks” and “Wet Hot American Summer” all have in common? The Sundance Film Festival.