Sundance Film Festival 2017: reviews, news, and interviews for the biggest movies – The Verge

Give Me Future is a powerful doc about Cuban youth culture disguised as an EDM concert

2017-11-11T10:00:11-05:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review originally appeared in conjunction with Give Me Future's premiere at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. It is being reposted to coincide with the film's Apple Music release.

"There's something young happening here," DJ Walshy Fire says late in the sprawling, inspiring concert documentary Give Me Future. He's sitting outdoors in Havana, Cuba with Diplo and Jillionaire, his partners in the genre-hopping electronic-music trio Major Lazer. They're talking with reverent awe about Cuba's music scene, and how rapidl …

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Bushwick review: the debate over punching Nazis takes on extra weight in this timely American apocalyptic thriller

2017-08-24T11:01:31-04:00

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Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. An earlier version of this review originally in January 2017, in conjunction with the Sundance Film Festival. It is being republished to coincide with the film's theatrical rollout.

Bushwick opens on a scene that's supposed to convey millennial Brooklynite normalcy: a college student and her boyfriend get off the L train, bantering about introducing him to her family, and complaining about the subway. The station is strangely empty. Then a man on fire runs down the stairs, and the real movie begins.

Directed by Jonat …

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Brigsby Bear is the warmest, sweetest movie about creativity since Be Kind Rewind

2017-07-27T16:43:29-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. A version of this review originally ran on January 27, 2017, in conjunction with the film's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The best way to see Dave McCary's terrific directorial debut Brigsby Bear is without knowing anything whatsoever about the story. The specific way it unfolds invites a lot of "What's going on, and what does it mean?" conjecture from the audience. It's more fun to watch than to read about.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to discuss the exact reasons the film works without getti …

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An Inconvenient Sequel is a superhero movie about a sad Al Gore

2017-07-26T12:15:00-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. A version of this review originally ran on January 20, 2017, in conjunction with the film's premiere at Sundance.

Al Gore didn't invent the internet, but going solely off his latest film, viewers might assume he singlehandedly launched the modern fight against climate change. An Inconvenient Sequel, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, and starting a limited American theatrical run on July 28th, is a follow-up to the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The original film mobilized a generation of climate activists …

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A Ghost Story has it all: romance, metaphysics, and Rooney Mara eating pie for five minutes

2017-07-07T09:55:43-04:00

This review of A Ghost Story was originally published on January 24th, 2017 as part of The Verge's Sundance Film Festival coverage. The film, which hits theaters this weekend, remains one of our favorite films of the year.

The first thing you will hear about A Ghost Story, director David Lowery's indie follow-up to last year's Pete's Dragon reboot, is that Rooney Mara spends five minutes comfort-eating a pie. Or maybe the unedited shot lasts 10 minutes. Or 15 or 20, depending on who in the audience you're asking. Whatever the case, it feels interminable, like a test of the viewer's indie film commitment, daring them to shift, clear their th …

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The Big Sick is a hilarious, tearjerking rom-com starring Kumail Nanjiani

2017-06-22T09:20:33-04:00

This review of The Big Sick was originally published on January 21st, 2017 as part of The Verge's Sundance Film Festival coverage. The film hits theaters this weekend and we're still just as smitten with the movie, a high-water mark for the romantic comedy genre and an welcome respite from the season's blockbusters.

Kumail Nanjiani is arguably best known for his role as Dinesh Chugtai on HBO's Silicon Valley, but I suspect regular readers of The Verge - folks fascinated with technology and the culture that unspools around it - probably know his work on Adventure Time, Bob's Burgers, The X-Files, and The Indoor Kids. That last one isn't a mo …

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Netflix’s Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower is a rallying cry for a protest age

2017-05-25T11:13:36-04:00

In January, Joe Piscatella's documentary Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower debuted at Sundance, and promptly won the Audience Award in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. The doc felt particularly relevant in that moment, given the widespread protests across the United States going on during the festival itself. And five months later, it …

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Colossal is a sharp, weird monster movie that seems destined to infuriate its fan base

2017-04-07T13:48:24-04:00

If there were a gambling site where you could go to make bets on how people are bound to react to individual movies, the money-making gambit of the season would be slapping your life savings on "Colossal is really going to piss people off." How many people, and how pissed off they're going to get, will probably depend on whether the advertising gets more specific and transparent about what the movie actually is. From the currently available teaser, Nacho Vigalondo's latest movie (after 2014's insane Elijah Wood / Sasha Grey stalker movie Open Windows and various horror shorts for the V/H/S and ABCs Of Death series) looks like a playful magic …

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Netflix’s dreary film The Discovery is Black Mirror meets Chicken Soup for the Soul

2017-03-31T10:04:41-04:00

The Discovery has the premise of a Black Mirror episode and the spiritual optimism of Chicken Soup for the Sci-Fi Nerd's Soul. It's the not-so-distant future, and Dr. Thomas Harber (Robert Redford) has collected overwhelming scientific evidence that upon death, our brainwaves make an exodus on a subatomic level. The "soul" leaves the body. Where consciousness goes, nobody knows, but the loose thread is enough to unravel humanity, inspiring an epidemic of suicides. When life is too painful, there's always the option to take the next train out of the station.

This review contains minor spoilers.

Two years and millions of suicides after the d …

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XX is a rambunctious horror anthology made by four promising female directors

2017-02-17T19:19:13-05:00

When director Jovanka Vuckovic introduced XX at its Sundance premiere, she made the origins of the project clear. A horror anthology that brings together installments from four female directors, Vuckovic said it was created "directly in response to the lack of opportunity for women filmmakers, particularly in the horror genre." Horror, of course, is a genre that's often touted as an easy first step for upcoming filmmakers, but sexism runs deep within the film industry, and for the producers of XX, one of the best ways to combat that was to simply create more opportunities for women in the first place.

The finished film combines shorts from …

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