Sundance 2018: Reviews and news from the premier independent-film festival – The Verge

Assassination Nation is a vicious, cathartic horror film about misogyny

2018-09-21T12:01:22-04:00

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Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

In October of last year, just days after several women accused producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, his frequent collaborator Woody Allen expressed fears of a "witch hunt atmosphere" for men. Countless people have since called the #MeToo movement that followed a "witch hunt," a piece of hyperbole that equates powerful men losing jobs to mass executions.

The film Assassination Nation, written and directed by Sam Levinson (Another Happy Day), also uses a wi …

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The emotional thriller Searching proves good computer-screen movies aren’t a fluke

2018-08-24T13:57:53-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally posted after the film's premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, where it played under the title Search. It has been updated for the film's wide theatrical release.

In 2015, the movie Unfriended landed in theaters, telling a conventional supernatural revenge story with an unconventional conceit: the entire film took place on the screen of one character's laptop. That approach really shouldn't have worked, but Unfriended was nevertheless a creepy, unsettling, low-budget success. When I spo …

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In HBO’s doc Come Inside My Mind, Robin Williams bares it all

2018-07-18T10:53:13-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally posted after the film's premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. It has been updated to reflect the film's HBO release.

Viewers can be forgiven for smirking at the seeming double entendre in the title of Marina Zenovich's HBO documentary Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind. It's not just that we live in an age of off-color call-and-response, where "That's what s/he said" and "69? Nice" have become conversational reflexes. It's just natural to assume that any seeming vulgarity in Williams' …

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Ari Aster’s breakout horror hit Hereditary is pants-wettingly scary

2018-06-08T10:53:13-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally published after Hereditary's debut at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. It has been updated to coincide with the film's theatrical release.

For the past several years, theater owners have been visibly struggling to find gimmicks to keep film lovers from abandoning movie theaters in favor of their own audiovisual setups at home. The rise of 3D and 4D films, the movement toward luxury seating and gourmet food in theaters, the push toward higher technical standards - they're all aimed at increasi …

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Half the Picture proves that #MeToo alone won’t solve sexism in entertainment

2018-01-31T17:37:49-05:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

In spite of all the focus on gender inequity in the film and TV industry over the past few years, the discrepancies are still dire. The visibility of the #MeToo movement and the sexual-abuse scandals that have rocked Hollywood may give the impression that women are making gains in the industry, but statistics still show them sliding backward in terms of representation: recent numbers show that half the students at the major film schools are women, but 91 percent o …

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The 8 weirdest things on-screen at Sundance 2018

2018-01-31T11:34:24-05:00

Independent filmmakers don't have a lot of security, but they do have a certain amount of freedom. Working outside the studio system, often on shoestring budgets and on personal projects, they have more leeway to barf their ids up onto the screen, sometimes with deeply bizarre results. The majority of the feature-length independent movies and VR projects that hit the Sundance Film Festival every year are looking for some form of traditional distribution, and are designed to appeal to some form of mass audience. And then there are the intensely idiosyncratic projects, the ones with feces-smeared dog-women and undulating ritualistic god-cats. …

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Our favorite feature films from Sundance 2018

2018-01-30T16:40:10-05:00

Every January, cinema fans don their boots and heavy coats, gear up for extensive line-standing and bus-waiting, and flock to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival. Founded in 1978, Sundance has become America's biggest independent film festival, and it's often the launch point for films from around the world that were made outside the studio system, and are looking for recognition and distribution deals. Some years, Sundance has a bigger impact than other years. 2017's lineup saw the premieres (and sales) of breakout hits like Call Me By Your Name and The Big Sick, in addition to gems like A Ghost Story, Brigsby Bear, and Ingrid G …

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A24’s unnerving Sundance hit Hereditary has a trailer and a release date

2018-01-30T09:26:00-05:00

One of the most buzzed-about films at the 2018 Sundance film festival was Ari Aster's unsettling writing and directing debut Hereditary, a horror film starring Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, and Milly Shapiro as a family haunted by their past. Or more accurately, haunted by their creepy dead grandmother. Or more accurately than that, haunted by things that should not be spoiled. Critics nearly universally praised Hereditary as shocking and terrifying, leading to some skeptical backlash from horror fans who felt burned by similar advance praise for films like The Witch and It Comes At Night, two extremely tense horror films in whic …

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The best VR and AR from Sundance 2018, from haptic gloves to alien abduction

2018-01-26T11:20:18-05:00

fThe Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier experimental section featured its first virtual reality experience in 2012, and with every festival, its projects have grown longer and more sophisticated. This year was no exception. The program included more than 20 virtual and augmented reality entries, ranging from simple mobile 360-degree video to multi-person performance art installations.

Many of these pieces came from well-known figures in the VR film and art world, attached to studios like Within, Felix & Paul, and Oculus. But 2018 also saw strong projects from relative newcomers, and a couple of absences, including Nonny de la Peña, who c …

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Summer of ‘84 is the grisly little brother of Stranger Things

2018-01-25T16:14:40-05:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

There's a world in which Stranger Things doesn't exist and the latest adaptation of Stephen King's It didn't just become a huge horror movie success. In that alternate timeline, the emergence of a film set in 1984 about a group of four high school kids trying to solve a local murder mystery - replete with burbling synthesizer score and pop-culture references - would likely be seen as a clever, inventive piece of retro nostalgia.

Unfortunately for Summer of '84, w …

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