Sundance 2019: reviews from the annual indie film festival – The Verge

The Hulu documentary Jawline poignantly explores the price of social media stardom

2019-08-23T12:05:37-04:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. It has been updated to reflect the film's release on Hulu.

In the middle of the documentary Jawline, 16-year-old nano-celebrity Austyn Tester organizes a fan meetup in a mall food court. A gaggle of teen and tween girls show up, and he soaks up their rapturous affection, offering compliments, hugs, and photos. Then, the group walks the mall together in a strange parody of a first date: Austyn in front, the girls trailing behind him, phone cameras aloft.

The momen …

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Netflix’s I Am Mother is a slow, tense movie about how we love and fear AI

2019-06-07T10:26:14-04:00

When a fictional AI "goes rogue," that often really means that it's working exactly as intended. Tell a machine to make paperclips, and it will turn the entire world into little twists of metal. Ask it to save the planet, and it will decide that people are Earth's greatest threat. We dream of creating machines that are smarter, more ethical, and more logical than ourselves. Then we …

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Hail Satan? puts the fun in Satanic fundamentalism

2019-04-17T14:53:30-04:00

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 the film's premiere at the the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. It has been updated to reflect the film's theatrical release, starting April 17th.

In 2013, an organization billing itself as The Satanic Temple made a minor news splash when it mounted a press conference at the Florida State Capitol to praise Governor Rick Scott for signing a bill to permit student-led "inspirational messages" at school events. The group issued a statement in support of freedom of religion, saying th …

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The Inventor examines the $9 billion Theranos scandal, and blames Silicon Valley

2019-03-19T11:11:20-04:00

Alex Gibney's documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley starts with a compelling, startling hook: an opening tease about a private tech startup launched by a 19-year-old, once valued at $9 billion, and now worth absolutely nothing. Theranos was a health-care company built around a device called the Edison, a desktop-printer-sized blood tester that purported to quickly perform hundreds of …

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The best VR and AR of the Sundance Film Festival

2019-02-07T13:07:22-05:00

Sundance's New Frontier section showcases some of the most ambitious and interesting experiments currently being done with virtual and augmented reality, among other works based on emerging technology. Over the past several years, these have evolved from simple proofs of concept to long, complex narratives and elaborate installations. In 2019, the show focused on pieces that blended real and virtual art, providing a look at what home audiences will see later this year, but also a taste (sometimes literally) of how festivals might keep offering a unique experience.

Facebook-owned VR giant Oculus often shows off new narrative projects at Sund …

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Paradise Hills is a gorgeous, confusing science fantasy

2019-02-04T09:00:00-05:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

Sometimes, the Sundance Film Festival is where you'll see the films that will help define the coming year in entertainment. Sometimes, it's where you'll find oddball projects like Paradise Hills: a beautiful, bizarre science fiction fairy tale about a group of young women who are sent to an oppressive reform school on a mysterious island.

Paradise Hills, the debut feature film from Spanish director Alice Waddington, is much stronger on style than it is on plot or …

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Netflix’s Velvet Buzzsaw feels like Robert Altman’s Final Destination

2019-02-01T15:12:52-05:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

Horror films often pack their character rosters with terrible people, as a hedge against the audience feeling too much empathy as those characters get bumped off one by one. Viewers might find horror a little less cathartic and a little more depressing if they actually liked every eviscerated victim on-screen, and were fruitlessly rooting for them, then watching them ignominiously lose their lives. So in horror movies with any significant body count (unlike, somet …

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Netflix documentary The Great Hack turns the Cambridge Analytica scandal into high drama

2019-01-30T10:47:52-05:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

"We were so in love with the gift of this technology that nobody bothered to read the terms and conditions."

"We got high-end connectivity, and we lost our way."

"It felt like our minds had been hacked."

Read the lines above in the most portentous and menacing tone imaginable, and you'll get a good sense of how The Great Hack - a new Netflix documentary about the Cambridge Analytica scandal - approaches its subject matter. The Great Hack covers one of 2018's bi …

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