Sundance 2019: reviews from the annual indie film festival

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.

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 and revised in conjunction with the film’s release on Netflix.

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 fear where that logic will take them.

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 that the bill “has reaffirmed our American freedom to practice our faith openly, allowing our Satanic children the freedom to pray in school.” It was a puckish take on a thinly disguised, widely unpopular attempt to return religion to public schools, but while the event itself only featured a handful of self-declared Satanists in black clothes and Halloween-costume robes, it drew a fair amount of press attention for its sheer outrageousness.

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 coincide with the film’s HBO release.

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 scans on a micro-dose of blood. Founder Elizabeth Holmes was once widely celebrated by magazines like Forbes and Fortune, and her youth, her startling looks, and her confident promises to upend and “democratize” the health-care industry made her a talk-show darling and a popular public figure.

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 Sundance, even when they’re not on the official slate. This year, it revealed an immersive theater experience called The Under Presents, which featured human actors playing roles in a surrealist cabaret. The high-profile AR startup Magic Leap also made its Sundance debut this year in New Frontier, where three pieces used its Magic Leap One headset.

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.

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, something like Get Out or The Visit, which focus on one or two desperate, sympathetic protagonists), it’s become fairly standard to make sure the early cannon fodder consists of people who’ve marked themselves as worthy of death via selfish, reckless, or outright dumb behavior.