Sundance Film Festival 2021: reviews, analysis, and more

In a Sundance Film Festival defined by the coronavirus pandemic, the New Frontier section — devoted to experimental projects like virtual reality films and interactive performance art — was also radically reimagined. The section is often one of Sundance’s most intensely physical experiences; in 2020, it included a series of VR films viewed while floating in a swimming pool. In 2021, during an entirely remote festival, it pushed for something different: making our own homes feel otherworldly.

Pared down to 14 projects, this year’s New Frontier focused on web art and social media alongside virtual and augmented reality experiences. The result was a show that felt intimate and intriguing — and set a model for showcasing interactive art online.

For the first time since its inception, this year’s iteration of the Sundance Film Festival wasn’t held in picturesque Park City, Utah. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the showcase turned into a virtual event. Promising directors were still on hand to showcase their work, but viewers were able to watch them from the comfort of their living rooms. It wasn’t just the way films were presented that changed, though. The pandemic also impacted how many of these movies were made and what they’re about.

The shift is most obvious in films that are explicitly about the pandemic, of which there are several. For instance, These Days is a pilot episode that stars Marianne Rendón and William Jackson Harper as two 20-somethings in New York struggling during the earlier stages of quarantine. Harper’s character is a culture journalist reporting stories about Zoom orgies, while Rendón is an aspiring dancer who feels like she’s falling behind since she can no longer dance. At one point, her best friend complains that she misses the early days of toilet paper hoarding and Tiger King binge-watching. It feels like a time capsule of early 2020: much of the movie takes place over Zoom calls, and director Adam Brooks says each actor was sent an equipment package so that they could film from their apartments.

In February 2003, a 19-year-old named Joshua Cooke shot his parents to death in their Virginia home. Cooke told his lawyers that he believed he was living in the Matrix, a simulated universe outlined in the 1999 Keanu Reeves blockbuster of the same name. Cooke pleaded guilty, and the defense was never used. But years later, he still offers a chilling, painful account of the moment he realized that killing another human being felt nothing like an action movie.

This is arguably a spoiler for A Glitch in the Matrix, a new documentary about the simulation hypothesis — the idea that our reality is actually artificial. But it’s key to explaining why the movie never comes together. A Glitch in the Matrix is a quirky overview of a popular and intriguing philosophical conundrum: what if we’re living in a video game? It’s also a film about people who take that conundrum incredibly seriously. But it never reconciles those elements. It’s like watching a dinner party conversation about paranormal activity where one guest is sharing wrenching stories about the spirits of dead loved ones and the other is quoting lines from Ghostbusters.

Like most recent events, the 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival has shifted from an in-person showcase to a virtual one. Despite the change, we’ll still be bringing you reviews on the most interesting experiences we find, from indie films to VR experiments.

The Pink Cloud starts with a message that underlines the distressing ludicrousness of where we are: it’s a movie about people stuck in a never-ending quarantine because of a deadly threat outside their doors. It’s also an early prescient one, as it was written in 2017 and filmed in 2019. It has no purposeful connections to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s impossible not to draw parallels between The Pink Cloud and our current reality.

Like most recent events, the 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival has shifted from an in-person showcase to a virtual one. Despite the change, we’ll still be bringing you reviews on the most interesting experiences we find, from indie films to VR experiments.

Halfway through Cryptozoo, a hypnotizing and beautiful animated film about classic cryptid creatures, the somewhat meandering story becomes apparent. And it’s distracting.

Like most recent events, the 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival has shifted from an in-person showcase to a virtual one. Despite the change, we’ll still be bringing you reviews and insight on the most interesting experiences we find, from indie films to VR experiments.

Prisoners of the Ghostland seems like a movie made for Nicolas Cage. It’s the English language debut from prolific Japanese director Sion Sono — Western audiences might know him best from the strange and gruesome series Tokyo Vampire Hotel on Amazon Prime Video — and it mashes together elements of Westerns, samurai films, and post-apocalyptic action movies. Cage’s genre work has become a genre itself, thanks to cult hits like Mandy and Color Out of Space. So on the surface, it sounds like a perfect match — but Prisoners of the Ghostland never manages to rise to the level of its cast or premise.

Like most recent events, the 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival has shifted from an in-person showcase to a virtual one. Despite the change, we’ll still be bringing you reviews and insight on the most interesting experiences we find, from indie films to VR experiments.

Censorship is the bane of artists, but it’s also a grudging compliment — because being a devoted censor requires believing that art has power. That belief is the dark heart of Censor, a horror film about the horror film world’s most infamous moral panic.