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

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 rapidly it’s changing.

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.

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.

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, won an Oscar, and sent the former vice president on a decade-long-and-counting PowerPoint tour. The newer, brisker, and unexpectedly more optimistic follow-up doc seeks, in large part, to calcify Gore’s legacy, resulting in a split-minded film that’s more fascinated with the former politician’s daily life than the melting polar ice sheets.

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 throat, uncomfortably laugh, or just grab their jacket and leave.

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 movie or television show, but a (now defunct) podcast Nanjiani hosted with his wife, the writer and producer Emily Gordon.

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 Netflix release.

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 still feels immediate and vital, like a rallying cry for anyone interested in collectively declaring their political stances in public. The causes in Joshua are radically different from the ones currently preoccupying America, but the pattern of government action and popular resistance is much the same. The eponymous Joshua is a fiercely optimistic figure, providing an successful example of civil disobedience in pursuit of institutional change.

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 magical-realist comedy about a woman discovering she’s somehow controlling a giant monster on the other side of the planet. It’s sort of that, for a few minutes at a time. The rest of the time, it’s a strong, angry statement about gender relationships that seems primed to alienate roughly half its audience.

Painful relationship drama, except with kaiju. 

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.

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 Vuckovic, Roxanne Benjamin, Karyn Kusama (The Invitation), and Anne Clark (better known as St. Vincent), all bound together by imaginative wraparound sequences by animator Sofia Carrillo. It’s at turns terrifying, hilarious, and uneven, but succeeds in doing its most important job: showing off a range of distinct directorial voices.

Modern virtual reality has been hailed as the future of Hollywood entertainment, our science fiction fantasies come to life. But there’s an ongoing problem: most VR experiences just aren’t that interesting. Hampered by evolving hardware and a medium with no set rules or audience expectations, most virtual reality experiences come off as either glorified tech demos, or simulacra of other, more established types of content. They’re usually riffing on stories that would be better told as short films or traditional games.

It’s partially a matter of storytelling conventions. Cinema has had more than a century to develop its own language of shots, cuts, and transitions, while storytelling in VR is still in its infancy. Creators are still figuring out what the medium can even do, let alone how to best take advantage. But virtual reality is only one small sliver in the much larger continuum of immersive entertainment. Real-world entertainment experiences have been evolving in their own right, developing their own unique approaches to storytelling. In the process, they aren’t just engaging audiences — they’re showing the way forward for virtual reality.

Sure, the Sundance Film Festival may primarily be about movies, but it’s also a time where tens of thousands of people from across the world get together in a quiet, snowy mountain town with limited accessibility, a ton of virtual reality gear, and a host of brands trying to capitalize. That means things can just get downright strange at times. From gross-out muppets and art installations, to adult babies and VR cats, this year’s festival was a bazaar of the bizarre. These were our “favorites.”

I’ve mentioned Chocolate before, but again, here is director Tyler Hurd’s description of his latest virtual reality experience:

Sundance this year was filled with virtual reality, protest marches, and days and days (and days) of snow. But when you go to a film festival you also watch a lot of films, and this year we saw an eclectic collection of titles across all types and genres. Dramas set in the Deep South, stories of a Brooklyn invasion, and one of the strangest supernatural movies ever made… there was a lot to take in. Here are our favorite movies from this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

When I walked into David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, I had no idea what to expect. I knew it had been shot in secret; I knew it featured Rooney Mara; and I knew Casey Affleck played a character who dies and shows up as a ghost dressed in a white sheet. When the film started, I discovered it was beautifully shot and fascinating. Then I found it to be utterly self-obsessed with a wordless pie-eating scene that stretched on for at least 10 minutes. Then I found it to be a pretty ingenious origin story about a poltergeist haunting. And then, after the movie had gotten weirder, stranger, and more evocative than I could have ever anticipated, I realized it was a beautiful ode to loneliness, loss, and the fierce courage it takes for us flawed human beings to accept fate and move on when tragedy strikes.

Whatever problems virtual reality had in 2016, the industry also laid important groundwork, and it’s starting to pay off — particularly at the experimental New Frontier showcase of this week’s Sundance Film Festival. Last year, VR took over a New Frontier that felt somewhat ill-prepared for it, leading to crowded rooms of people awkwardly crowding onto couches with mobile headsets. This year, New Frontier feels like a distinct part of the festival, and the pieces themselves are more mature. While there’s still plenty of experimental work that will interest enthusiasts more than newcomers, the winners in each category below are thematically innovative, technically impressive, and artistically compelling.

Where last year’s virtual reality took place almost entirely through Google Cardboard, Gear VR, and HTC Vive, this year saw an influx of Oculus Rift headsets. Oculus itself brought five experiences to the show, three of which are on the list below. HTC appeared with its own mini-slate of projects, as did VR cinema companies Jaunt and Condition One. There were also independent projects from veteran Sundance contributors Nonny de la Peña and Rose Troche, both of which touch on the consequences of homophobia: Troche’s If Not Love follows a fictionalized mass shooting by a conflicted gay fundamentalist, and de la Peña’s Out of Exile: Daniel’s Story covers the issue of homeless and disowned LGBT youth.

It is the far future, and humanity has transcended its bodily limitations. By visiting a neurocosmetology lab — which looks quite a lot like a beauty salon — you can be fitted with a set of Octavia Electrodes — a form of trans-cranial stimulation that allows access to a digital multiverse, but looks quite a lot like a set of braid extensions. This is the world of NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism, an art installation and virtual reality experience that appeared at this week’s Sundance Film Festival.

NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism, developed by studio Hyphen-Labs, is composed of two parts. The first is a series of inventions meant to address modern-day problems for women of color — from the potentially dangerous, like surveillance and harassment, to the mundane, like sunblock that won’t blend with dark skin. HyperFace Camouflage, developed with privacy-focused artist Adam Harvey, tricks facial detection systems by printing “false faces” to distract computer vision algorithms. Artist Michelle Cortese helped create a pair of chunky earrings with audio and video recording capabilities, in order to record police misconduct or other altercations. And AB Screenwear worked on a visor that, when worn, reflects unfriendly faces back at themselves.

In the first few moments of Showtime’s upcoming documentary Trumped: Inside the Greatest Political Upset of All Time, Hillary Clinton’s campaign plane touches down. It’s the night before the election, and journalist John Heilemann speaks briefly with campaign chairman John Podesta, asking him what will happen if Clinton doesn’t prevail on Election Day. Podesta echoes a sentiment that pundits, and reportedly both campaigns, believed to be true: that Donald J. Trump would not win. But what at the time had no doubt been a bit of cautious optimism plays in retrospect like a moment of dark foreboding; a calm before a cataclysmic storm.

Showtime had been producing an ongoing docuseries throughout the presidential race called The Circus, featuring Heilemann and then-Bloomberg colleague Mark Halperin as they covered both campaigns. In the wake of the upset, the team decided to make a feature-length documentary, using all the footage they had collected along the way. There’s a tremendous opportunity in taking the events of the last 19 months and reassessing what happened, particularly in the interest of understanding what socio-political trends led to November 8th, and whether some of the more sinister revelations of recent weeks had been telegraphed much sooner.

The faux-recovered film is a great cinematic conceit, and retro-futurism is a perpetually compelling aesthetic. So Future ‘38, which premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival this week, ought to be a fantastic movie. It’s an independent film written and directed by Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego TV series writer Jamie Greenberg, starring a small cast of experienced but relatively low-profile actors. In the introduction, celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson makes a cameo appearance to laud this obscure 1938 movie that predicted the future with eerie accuracy — actually, a modern production in the style of a ‘30s screwball sci-fi comedy.

Sadly, the rest of the film never lives up to this premise.

Sundance 2017 is the festival where cinematic virtual reality is growing up: we’ve got one of the longest VR movies ever made, one of the most sophisticated animated projects, and — outside the festival, but during the same period — the first Oscar nomination for a VR experience.

At the same time, Chocolate is a reminder that the medium can still be very, very weird and silly. Chocolate is the latest creation from Butts and Old Friend director Tyler Hurd, a former Double Fine animator who’s now known for his whimsical VR shorts. It’s only a few minutes long, but every second is goofily delightful.

Science fiction has been popping up in novel ways here at Sundance, and in the case of Marjorie Prime, it’s a Black Mirror-esque look at a future world where technology helps people deal with grief and the loss of loved ones. Directed by Experimenter’s Michael Almereyda, and based on a play by Jordan Harrison, it stars Jon Hamm as a holographic, AI-driven re-creation of an elderly woman’s dead husband that chats with her to keep her company.

It’s the kind of premise that could go in any number of wild, high-concept directions — like it did in the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” — but for Almereyda, the science fiction elements are just a framework. He cast Geena Davis, Tim Robbins, and Lois Smith, who deliver fantastic, nuanced performances. And he stays true to his source material, crafting a quiet, beautiful film that ruminates on the way we deal with tragedy and loss. It may not be science fiction in the traditional sense — but where else can you see Jon Hamm play a chatbot?

The mood in the room after an early Sundance screening of Adam Bhala Lough’s The New Radical was polite, but a little icy. Viewers who stayed for the post-film Q&A asked sarcastic questions like “Do you think it’s okay for my 12-year-old son to download gun plans off the internet?” and “If I have a machine shop that can produce a nuke, should I?” They were mostly aiming these questions at the film’s central subject, Cody Wilson, the face of the 3D-printable gun movement. The New Radical touches on other crypto-anarchists, hacktivists, and the Second Amendment enthusiasts touting printable guns as a form of “radical equality.” But the movie repeatedly comes back to Wilson and his company, Defense Distributed, which develops printable files for weapons, and sells a self-contained CNC mill called Ghost Gunner, used for making untraceable guns. In the documentary, director Adam Bhala Lough follows Wilson through the past several years of activism: putting 3D gun files online, being forced to pull them back off by the State Department, partnering with Iranian-British rebel Amir Taaki on the DarkWallet anonymous Bitcoin use project, suing the State Department on First Amendment grounds, and much more.

In the film, Wilson is openly positive about the election of Donald Trump, which may help explain the film’s chilly reception among the liberal-leaning Sundance audience. Then again, there are plenty of reasons for people on the left — Lough included — to find Wilson unsettling. Lough interviews him at length in The New Radical, about other pioneers of the crypto movement, other libertarian radical activists, and how printable weapons level the playing field for anyone who wants a potentially undetectable plastic gun without any government oversight. He also gets into Wilson’s smash-the-state philosophy at some length. The film is a useful overview of recent struggles between hacktivists and the state, from WikiLeaks’ exposure of Hillary Clinton’s emails to Edward Snowden’s NSA whistleblowing to the rise and fall of Silk Road. It’s also strikingly current; Lough had to go back and shoot a new ending after the 2016 election, to bring in Trump’s victory and address what it means for radicals and resistors. I sat down with Lough and Wilson at Sundance to talk about the current state of the art in 3D-printed guns, the current state of crypto-anarchism, and how a First Amendment activist can also be a moderately enthused Trump supporter.

There are a number of reasons I’m hesitant to recommend Kuso, the first film from artist and musician Steven Ellison, aka Flying Lotus. (Spoilers and grotesquely explicit descriptions ahead.) I’ll start with the footage of an erect penis being stabbed. As with most footage of an erect penis being violently gored by a long steel rod, it’s certainly unexpected. So by the time you cover your eyes, it’s already too late. And if you happened to blink, it’s cool, Kuso delivers a callback.

To paraphrase the official plot synopsis, Kuso is a collection of semi-connected short films chronicling the lives of the mutated women, men, and children of Los Angeles, following the earthquake to end all earthquakes. But that’s not really Kuso’s story, let alone its point. While the film does hint at some interesting (though opaque) commentary about Los Angeles, racism, and the grim and bloody history of America, its creators are mostly interested in one thing: producing the grossest film ever.

The Sundance Film Festival is finishing up this week, and Amazon Studios and Netflix have once again descended upon Park City, Utah. The annual fest is an opportunity for the companies to pick up new films and documentaries to bolster their streaming services.

Purchases in January can pay off by Oscars season. Amazon picked up Manchester by the Sea for a relatively high (Sundance-wise, anyway) $10 million at last year’s festival, a move that’s delivered (Casey Affleck controversy notwithstanding) with the film’s recent Golden Globes win for Best Actor and six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. And so, with the help of Sundance, Amazon beat Netflix to the first Best Picture nom for a streaming service.

It sounds strange to call a 40-minute film “possibly the longest virtual reality movie ever made,” but it’s true. Miyubi, released by prolific VR studio Felix & Paul, is twice or even three times as long as the vast majority of cinematic VR experiences. It’s not a documentary, experimental art, a sponsored tie-in, or yet another family-friendly cartoon. It’s a scripted comedy — not a genre VR is known for.

Miyubi was conceived by Felix & Paul and written with the help of Funny or Die. It’s set in the 1980s and puts viewers in the body of a Japanese robot that share’s the project’s name. When a businessman buys Miyubi as a Christmas present for his son, it gives us an intimate — albeit temporary — window into a loving but troubled family.

Asteroids, the second animated project from virtual reality studio Baobab, has lofty ambitions for a 10-minute short. It’s supposed to draw elements from both traditional animation and video games, put them in VR, and end up with something unprecedented: a piece of storytelling that, as Asteroids director (and Madagascar co-director) Eric Darnell describes it, lets us connect to fictional characters the way we would real human beings.

It’s also supposed to be a funny cartoon about aliens in the style of classic Warner Bros.