Movie Reviews: Sundance Film Festival 2024
Reviews by Eric McClanahan
This week Eric McClanhan talks recaps some of the films from this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
The Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award which went to Jesse Eisenberg for the script for his second feature film, A Real Pain. The film tells the story of two adult cousins who have the opportunity to partake in what is essentially a Holocaust tour of their grandmother’s birthplace in Poland. Eisenberg plays David while Kieran Culkin plays Benji, and at the offset we’re led to believe that David is the put-together one while Benji is a bit hapless. As the tour unfurls and the cousins are able to reveal themselves fully, we see that appearances aren’t everything, and some of the people that we see as of this world but apart from it have it the most figured out. As this is a celebration of Polish culture, it features a soundtrack swimming in Chopin.
Little Death
Speaking of Chopin, his sparse piano works also appear in the NEXT Innovator Award was given to Jack Begert’s experimental existential dramedy Little Death.Starring David Schwimmer and a host of impressive talent, the film begins as a look into his character Martin Solomon’s Hollywood adventure, but we soon realize that it’s not his movie, at all. If anything, the film’s throughline is found in a chihuahua who finds himself under the care of many while called by many names. It’s as if you took Prozac Nation, Adaptation, Woody Allen (not a Woody Allen film, mind you, but actually Woody Allen), KIDS, Requiem for a Dream, and a dash of demonic AI and placed them in a blender you might have something like this film. If you placed the chihuahua in the blender, then you’d absolutely have this film.
Speaking of AI, that brings us right into our next film, the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize-winning Love Me, from directing duo Sam & Andy Zuchero. The film opens with a swift and brutal time lapse of our demise as humanity at our own hands, and then settles into a post-apocalyptic calm, albeit a lonely one. As a sentient buoy floats alone on still waters, an exploratory satellite returns searching for “life forms.” Unable to be alone, she asserts herself as one, assuming the identity of a social media influencer from a historical database, and even goes so far as to assign the satellite the identity of her onscreen beau that they may more easily personify their conversation and eventual courtship. What emerges is a beautifully rendered human tale of connection in a post-human era, quite reminiscent of Spike Jonez’s Her.
Another success story from the festival is the surprise actioner Thelma, featuring a first-time lead performance from Oscar-nominated actress June Squibb at age 94. Selling to Magnolia Pictures after its premiere, the Josh Margolin vehicle is a laugh-out-loud, feel-good action comedy about the titular Thelma who, after being inspired by Tom Cruise’s do-or-die stunt antics in his Mission: Impossible films, takes it upon herself to track down the thieves who fleeced her out of $10,000 through a phone scam. Enlisting the help of a (literally) old acquaintance, played by late Shaft actor Richard Roundtree, she takes off across the city, evading her over-caring adult children (a delightful Clark Gregg and Parker Posey) to face-off with a menacing, if not slightly infirm, Malcolm McDowell. It’s hilarious, inspiring, imaginative, and ultimately an authentic note of gratitude to the people who’ve taught us to love and believe and fight for what we believe in.
Between the Temples
The last film I watched was the immersive Between the Temples, by Nathan Silver, starring Jason Schwartzmann, Carol Kane, and Robert Smigel. The film tells the story of a widower who works as a Cantor at his local synagogue but finds himself unable to sing as grief and a loss of purpose overtake him. After a brief bar fight, he is found by his old music teacher, who takes a liking to his youthful naivete and enlists his help to prepare for a late-life bat mitzvah to atone for the one she never had as a youth. What follows is a delightful tale of friendship and mutual visibility that constantly confounds the viewer with its intimations of a will-they/won’t-they May/December possibility that will infuriate and delight. Its claustrophobic camera angles reveal a funny, anxiety-inducing, yet beautiful meditation on love, family, and religious liturgy. A celebration of Jewish culture with an ability to ask questions without forcing answers.
I also screened the NEXT Audience Award-winning Kneecap, a mockumentary about a Northern Irish rap trio trying to keep the native tongue alive through their music, co-starring Michael Fassbender, as well as the New York documentary As We Speak, which explored the weaponization of rap lyrics by law enforcement to convict hip-hop artists on little more than crudely sketched character definitions. Overall, it was an eclectic mix befitting the venerated festival, with the best use of the word “Boner” in a film, the best use of power locks for comedic effect, and a series of non-endings that celebrate cinema’s ability to act as window or mirror rather than soothsayer to our world at large.
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Originally published at http://behindtherabbitproductions.wordpress.com on February 21, 2024.
