Sundance Film Festival 2016: The best new films, shows and VR – The Verge

Manchester by the Sea is a beautiful tragedy, and Casey Affleck’s finest role

2016-11-18T13:46:00-05:00

Eleven months after its Sundance premiere, Manchester by the Sea has opened in limited release. In hindsight, the drama is not just one of the best films from Sundance 2016; it's one of the best films of the year. This review was originally published on January 25th, 2016.

Secondary drowning is a grim death. Following a near drowning incident, the liquid remaining in the lungs of a victim can trigger the inward extrusion of bodily floods. Hours or even days after escaping the water, the body begins to drown in its own liquids.

Manchester by the Sea, the highly anticipated drama from writer / director Kenneth Lonergan, tells the story of a …

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Here’s how Sundance’s first VR residency film got made

2016-02-09T10:12:20-05:00

Since the first piece of modern virtual reality showed up at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012, the medium has occupied a bigger and bigger place at the show. In 2015, there were 11 virtual reality experiences at its experimental New Frontier exhibit. In 2016, there were closer to 35 - including one that the Sundance Institute helped bring into existence. It's called Collisions, a beautifully shot film about one man's memory of nuclear bomb tests in the Australian desert. And it's one of the festival's first steps toward positioning virtual reality not as an experiment, but as an up-and-coming medium.

As we saw at Sundance, virtual reality …

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The best films of Sundance 2016

2016-02-01T11:56:46-05:00

The last screen has gone dark, the awards have been handed out, and Park City is comfortably under capacity again. But Sundance isn't over until The Verge's Sundance team have named their favorites among this year's diverse film lineup. Here they are, in no particular order.

Dark Night

Bryan Bishop: Films and television love to give us tidy, narrative takes on atrocities so we can come to grips, stick them in a box, and file it all away under "Can't Happen Here." They remove the fear, but Tim Sutton's surreal meditation on the dangers of gun violence goes the opposite direction. Loosely inspired by the 2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora, …

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Nuts: a documentary about goat testicle transplants that’s too good to be true

2016-01-30T10:00:02-05:00

The adage "fact is stranger than fiction" is muddied in Nuts, the new documentary from director Penny Lane (Our Nixon, The Voyagers) about a poor man becoming rich off a big idea and a few thousand goat testicles.

Lane strikes pay dirt with her subject, the surgeon John Romulus Brinkley, who built a medical empire in the 1930s by transplanting goat glands into the scrotum to cure male impotence. He leveraged his wealth to build a medical empire, with hospitals in multiple states. And to promote those hospitals, Brinkley operated two radio stations, first with KFKB (Kansas Folks Know Best), which spread country music and hours of daily adver …

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The best virtual reality from the 2016 Sundance Film Festival

2016-01-29T15:23:45-05:00

I went to Sundance 2016 for the express purpose of covering virtual reality, and over the past week, I tried out all but a handful of the 30-plus VR-related experiences at its experimental New Frontier show. New Frontier is obviously just one part of the festival, but since last year, virtual reality has been big enough to merit a collection of the weirdest, darkest, and most sublime excursions that we've taken into other worlds. Here are some of the most interesting moments from my show - I've chronicled several more over the course of our Sundance coverage.

My five favorite VR experiences

I put my top three VR experiences (Giant, 6×9, and …

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Stephen King adaptation 11.22.63 isn’t going to turn Hulu into HBO

2016-01-28T19:55:19-05:00

While Netflix and Amazon have been able to transform themselves into legitimate creators of high-end, award-winning television, Hulu has continued to find itself on the outside looking in. The streaming service has invested hundreds of millions of dollars locking down classics like South Park and Seinfeld, and rescuing favorites like The Mindy Project from the deathblow of network cancellation. But it has yet to create an original series that has driven the cultural conversation the way House of Cards, Transparent, or Making a Murderer have.

Hulu is taking its biggest swing with 11.22.63, an eight-part mini-series adaptation of the Stephen …

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The Blackout Experiments takes you inside the most traumatic haunted house of all time

2016-01-28T11:00:02-05:00

I've always been a fan of being scared. Even when I was a little kid and my elementary school had a book fair, I didn't buy Encyclopedia Brown; I picked up the Dynamite Book of Ghosts and Haunted Houses - because even at that age, getting freaked out of my mind was cathartic in a way I couldn't really express. That developed over the years (Mr. King and Mr. Barker, please meet my new friend Mr. Lovecraft), and about 10 years ago I discovered the haunted house scene. You know what I'm talking about; the kind of place where you pay $60 to have people with chainsaws chase you into tiny rooms filled with fake body parts. But you can only see so …

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Operation Avalanche is a fake documentary about the faked Apollo Moon landing

2016-01-28T10:24:01-05:00

Sometimes all it takes is one scene for a movie to stand out. A single moment, concept, or shot can make the difference between something sticking in your mind indelibly, or fading from memory altogether. When you've got several of those moments strung together, you're not only ahead of the curve - you've likely got a very strong film on your hands.

All of which makes Matt Johnson's second feature, Operation Avalanche, so frustrating. Premiering here at Sundance, it's a conspiracy thriller about the faking of the Apollo Moon landing that doesn't just have one special moment - it's got dozens of them, piling smart ideas and clever beats atop …

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Sundance 2016 Days 4-5: Dark Night, Lo and Behold, and the drama of being human

2016-01-26T18:26:24-05:00

I've been enjoying editing and reading Adi Robertson's coverage of the massive amount of VR at this year's New Frontier section - even if you aren't here at Sundance, I'd highly recommend checking her stuff out. My enjoyment is partly vicarious, as it's nearly impossible for me to fit any of the installations and demos into my schedule, and partly because she's doing such a great job at distilling what the manifold priorities on display in the chaotic Wild West of the format. I particularly enjoyed her most recent column, in which she talked about the more psychedelic, abstract experiences on display. What she's getting at is contradictory, …

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The Chickening is a NSFW, poultry-covered remix of The Shining

2016-01-26T15:43:40-05:00

The Chickening, a surreal short film that screened at Sundance 2016, is like a high-touch TV pilot for Adult Swim. Director / animators Nick DenBoer and Davy Force have spliced, warped, and reanimated The Shining into a five-minute movie trailer featuring a mustachioed Danny; a chicken-pitching Jack Torrance; and a space alien Dick Halloran, whose sexual organs - if I'm reading this correctly - have been replaced with a live chicken head. Consider that my NSFW warning.

Does every bit work? Oh gosh, no! The short can be downright off-putting. "Where," you may ask while watching The Chickening, "are that man's privates?" I have no answers, on …

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