Reviews
Sundance Review: jeen-yuhs Paints a Humanizing Portrait of Kanye West’s Beginnings
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: Before his marriage to (and subsequent divorce from) Kim Kardashian, before his abortive 2020 presidential campaign, before the wild tweets and outrageous behavior that would define his public persona in the 2020s, there was just Kanye West and the music. From the beginning, the Atlanta-born, Chicago-raised producer turned rapper knew he was going to be one of the greatest musicians of all time; his first album, 2004’s The College Dropout, is studded with lines to that effect (“I was born to be different”). But it took the world a while to catch up with his ambition, and the problems didn’t stop there even after he finally broke through. By his side for the last twenty years was Clarence “Coodie” S...
Sundance Review: Director Amy Poehler Gets to the Heart of Two Entertainment Pioneers with Lucy and Desi
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: I Love Lucy is so inextricably tied to pop culture that many of its trademarks are still recognizable today, over seventy years since the show first aired. The central duo, brought to life by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, has been an object of fascination for almost as long — look at Aaron Sorkin‘s current project, Being the Ricardos, which has the edge in flashiness thanks to the star power of Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. Director Amy Poehler‘s thoughtful documentary on the subject has one extremely important thing Sorkin’s series lacks, though — access to the real thing. Thanks to a treasure trove of audio tapes and home movies shared by the daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Lucie Arnaz, Luc...
Sundance Review: Ramin Bahrani Tests the Conscience of the American Id in 2nd Chance
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: America is a land of mythmaking: if you’re savvy and lucky (and often, unscrupulous) enough, you can carve out a legend of your own design. That’s what happened to Richard Davis, the oddball inventor of the bulletproof vest, who spun a tall tale about self-defense in a Michigan alleyway into a million-dollar company selling protective body armor to America’s police and military forces. A blustering showman with no small sense of spectacle, Davis hawked his wares with, as one flyer declares in bold letters, “SEX & VIOLENCE”: amateur films that featured everything from comedy skits to bikini-clad women to schlocky fictional shootouts that make Samurai Cop look like Dirty Harry. Oh, and he shot hi...
Sundance Review: You Won’t Be Alone is Staggering, Contemplative Folk Horror
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: In 19th-century Macedonia, a young girl is born to a woman in a remote mountain village. But mere days after her birth, the mother is approached by Old Maid Maria (Anamaria Marinca), a mysterious, ancient witch — covered in flame-scarred skin — who lives outside the village and takes the blood of first-born children. Fearing for her child’s life, the mother takes her to a remote mountain cavern free from the witch’s influence, keeping her there for sixteen years without any other human contact. Eventually, the witch comes for her anyway, and soon the girl is transformed into a witch-creature like her, living under yet another stifling parental environment. Before long, she’s left to wander the Macedonia...
Sundance Review: We Need to Talk About Cosby Unravels the Man and the Monster
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: For fifty years, Bill Cosby was America’s Dad, a trailblazer for Black culture on film and television, and comedy. I Spy, The Electric Company, The Cosby Show: All pioneering examples of Black excellence and a guiding light to generations of Black people who yearned to see themselves depicted on screen with grace and intelligence. And then, we learned about the man under those comfy sweaters: someone with credible accusations of sexual assault and rape of dozens of women. For standup comedian W. Kamau Bell, and many Black people across America who’d grown up revering Cosby, those accusations were a tough pill to swallow. What do you do when a man whom you’d idolized, someone who carries seismic importan...
Sundance Review: Karen Gillan Faces Herself in Riley Stearns’ Deadpan Dual
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: Sarah (Karen Gillan) is dying of a rare, incurable disease. It’s no big shakes, though, because up to now she hasn’t really lived: she has a strained, distant relationship with her boyfriend (Beulah Koale), her mother is disapproving, and she can’t even be bothered to cry when she receives her prognosis. Still, she unthinkingly accepts an offer to go through the process of “replacement”: growing a clone of her that will learn the ins and outs of her life, then take over when she dies. But ten months of watching her double (also Gillan, obviously) insinuate herself into her life, Sarah learns that she’s making a full recovery. But she’s got two problems: a) her boyfriend and family like the double more t...
Sundance Review: 892 Turns Real-Life Tragedy Into Mawkish Melodrama
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: On July 17, 2017, former Marine lance corporal Brian Brown-Easley (John Boyega) walked into a Wells Fargo bank branch in the Atlanta suburbs, with a grey sweatshirt and backpack, and handed the teller a simple note with four words: I have a bomb. Soon, he’s taken hostages, with police negotiators and a confused media scrambling to defuse the situation. His demands? A measly $892 in disability funds denied to him by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Those are the circumstances reconstructed in Abi Damaris Corbin’s 892, a well-intentioned and occasionally striking thriller that charts the heartbreaking moments of a desperate man’s last gasps at visibility and relevance. Related Video Attica! T...
Sundance Review: In Jesse Eisenberg’s When You Finish Saving the World, Everyone Loses
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: What happens when tensions between an equally oblivious mother and son (Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard, respectively) finally boil over? In Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut, the answer is, unfortunately, sort of nothing. There’s something to be said for slice-of-life films like this one, adapted from Eisenberg’s 2020 audio drama of the same name and co-produced by Emma Stone and husband Dave McCary. The film raises plenty of interesting questions, particularly around the ideas of altruism, actual moral goodness in a world perpetually concerned with what looks good, and the tried and true theme of generational divide. The simmering story only runs 88 minutes (a dream!), but, throughout that runtime, When...
The Afterparty Review: Apple TV+’s Comedic Murder Mystery Might Be the Most Inventive TV Show of 2022 (So Far)
The Pitch: For those familiar with the work of 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord, there are a few constants, a major one being their talent for taking a premise and making it simultaneously very clear and simple and also deceptively complex. Apple TV+’s The Afterparty is a perfect example of this, presenting itself initially as a fairly straightforward murder mystery out of the pages of Agatha Christie, with Tiffany Haddish in the Hercule Poirot role. On its own merits, that’s an idea that would be enough to inspire interest, and then Miller (who created the series and directs every episode; Lord serves as an executive producer) adds an additional layer: Every episode, which focuses on one potential suspect’s version of events, also utilizes a different...
Earl Sweatshirt’s SICK!: Flawless Rapping That Doesn’t Overstay Its Welcome
How does one find the perfect words to describe life-changing events, the oppressiveness of living in a constant state of stress caused by a pandemic, and reflections of the past? Nobody pays me enough to answer that question. Luckily, I don’t have to, because Earl Sweatshirt discovered the cheat code. SICK!, his fourth album, is inspired by this moment in time. But it’s not just the COVID in the air on his mind. Since the last time we heard him in 2019, Earl said “hi” to fatherhood, cut back on his alcohol, and rediscovered his religion. Any one of those things is enough to pen something the size of a Greek epic poem. But all three? And in the face of, well, all of this? That’s a lot to process. The mere fact Earl only took 25 minutes to say it all with his chest is a testament to his tal...
How I Met Your Father Review: Hulu’s Sequel Series Has Some Scraps of Potential
The Pitch: Somewhere in the vast wide multiverse, there is a planet Earth where, in the year 2022, the How I Met Your Mother spin-off series How I Met Your Dad is just now reaching its eighth season, with star Greta Gerwig thinking longingly about the indie film about growing up in Sacramento that she always wished she’d have a chance to direct. That planet Earth is not our planet Earth, where, in the year 2022, How I Met Your Dad ended as a 2014 CBS pilot that never made it to series, Greta Gerwig’s 2018 film Lady Bird received five Oscar nominations, and Hilary Duff is now starring in How I Met Your Father, a spiritual and literal sequel to the long-running CBS sitcom about the world’s most long-winded parent giving his kids way too much information about his past dating life. Does Sophi...
Naomi Review: Ava DuVernay Brings a New Type of Superhero Story to the CW
The Pitch: Naomi lives inside the difference between an origin story and a coming-of-age story. The CW’s newest superhero story features Kaci Walfall as the titular teenager, who was already living a pretty interesting life before the possibility that she might have superpowers became a possibility. Based on the first two episodes, the first season (which won’t be crossing over with the rest of the Arrow-verse) is set up to offer an extended look at Naomi’s dawning realization of her own abilities, while also contending with the day-to-day realities of being a modern-day teenager. The show’s success is dependent on how much you want to see both of those elements play out, but thanks to Walfall’s charismatic performance, Naomi’s story proves easy to connect with. Not Your Ordinary Teen Supe...
