Sundance 2020: reviews from the annual indie film festival – The Verge The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts. 2020-02-07T18:25:45+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/rss/stream/20892114 https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/verge-rss-large_80b47e.png?w=150&h=150&crop=1 Adi Robertson <![CDATA[Sundance VR and AR got extremely weird in 2020]]> https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/7/21125284/sundance-best-vr-ar-film-festival-new-frontier-2020 2020-02-07T13:25:45-05:00 2020-02-07T13:25:45-05:00
Scarecrow | Sundance Institute

The Sundance Film Festival's experimental New Frontier show has gotten so big and elaborate that it's becoming its own miniature festival - which means making hard trade-offs about what to see. So I missed some exciting-sounding projects in 2020. Sorry, Chomsky vs. Chomsky: First Encounter, the Noam Chomsky-powered AI. It's not you, it's me, sci-fi mushroom simulator Hypha. And the timing just didn't work out, anti-capitalist live-streamed virtual reality theater Anti-Gone.

Sundance and other virtual or augmented reality-heavy art events might eventually have to grapple with this issue. Projects are getting longer (10 to 30 minutes, versus …

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]]> Adi Robertson <![CDATA[La Llorona is not the ghost story you’re expecting]]> https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21081040/la-llorona-review-jayro-bustamante-shudder-horror-sundance-2020 2020-02-06T16:27:17-05:00 2020-02-06T16:27:17-05:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

In 2019, the blockbuster Conjuring franchise produced a film called The Curse of La Llorona, which is generally considered pretty bad. This is unfortunate, because it's going to confuse a lot of people who hear about the contemporaneous La Llorona - an excellent indie movie that puts a supernatural twist on a story of very human horror.

La Llorona is technically about La Llorona, the weeping spirit of a woman cursed for drowning her children. But Guatemalan director Ja …

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]]> Adi Robertson <![CDATA[Shirley is a gothic drama about Shirley Jackson’s haunted life]]> https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/5/21110859/shirley-jackson-film-review-elisabeth-moss-genre-sundance-2020 2020-02-05T15:16:24-05:00 2020-02-05T15:16:24-05:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Shirley Jackson is best known for her creepiest and most misanthropic work, like her novel The Haunting of Hill House and the vicious short story "The Lottery." But she was also a prolific chronicler of domestic life, publishing two books of lighthearted stories about raising her children. It's a complexity that was frequently pointed out a few years ago, after the release of a Jackson biography in 2016.

Josephine Decker's new film Shirley isn't a biography. It's a dra …

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]]> Adi Robertson <![CDATA[Pepe the Frog died, and part of the internet died with him]]> https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/5/21113587/pepe-frog-feels-good-man-matt-furie-trolling-documentary-review-sundance-2020 2020-02-05T12:28:47-05:00 2020-02-05T12:28:47-05:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Years ago, the birth of a meme was cause for celebration. So when Matt Furie's character Pepe first became famous online, it seemed like a good thing. The easygoing cartoon frog was a shorthand for relatable satisfaction or sadness, particularly on the chaotic message board 4chan. And when a friend urged Furie to crack down on copycat Pepes, he didn't see the need. This was, after all, the age where everything was a remix.

But the new documentary Feels Good Man, direct …

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]]> Adi Robertson <![CDATA[Tesla is a weird, fourth-wall-breaking take on the internet’s favorite inventor]]> https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/29/21112889/tesla-movie-review-sundance-2020-ethan-hawke-michael-almereyda 2020-01-29T12:16:39-05:00 2020-01-29T12:16:39-05:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Thomas Edison is the inventor you learn about in school. Nikola Tesla is the inventor you learn about on the internet - whether that's The Oatmeal's massive 2012 paean to "the greatest geek who ever lived;" Kate Beaton's sexy Tesla comic; or the Drunk History episode where he's played by John C. Reilly. (That's not even counting the memes about Elon Musk's car company and David Bowie in The Prestige.)

Tesla, directed by Michael Almereyda, adds one very important thing …

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]]> Adi Robertson <![CDATA[Zola proves that a viral Twitter thread can make a great movie]]> https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/28/21082396/zola-thestory-viral-twitter-thread-film-review-sundance-2020 2020-01-28T13:20:12-05:00 2020-01-28T13:20:12-05:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

In 2015, a little-known Twitter user named Aziah King posted the first words of a 148-tweet saga: "Y'all wanna hear a story about why me & this here bitch fell out???????? It's kind of long but full of suspense."

The tale that followed - a stripper road trip to Florida involving murder, human trafficking, and an attempted suicide - seemed too wild to be true. But #TheStory, as it was called, turned into a Twitter phenomenon. Rolling Stone confirmed it actually happened …

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]]> Adi Robertson <![CDATA[Spree review: in search of an audience]]> https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/26/21081405/spree-movie-review-joe-keery-sundance-2020 2020-01-26T11:20:30-05:00 2020-01-26T11:20:30-05:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

When a real-life killer finds fame on a forum or a social network - a trend that's become depressingly frequent in recent years - there are two common conclusions. The first is that social media is some kind of new, unprecedented evil, as if the Zodiac killer never crafted an elaborate brand strategy through local newspapers, or TV news never helped turn mass shooters into celebrities. The second is that modern web platforms simply produce their own distinct kinds of ni …

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