Category: sundance 2016

It would be simple to reduce James Schamus’ directorial debut, Indignation, to a “screenwriter’s movie.” This intelligent and classically-minded period piece is, after all, based on a novel by noted man of letters Philip Roth. To say such a thing, though,...

Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women consists of three stories about three women. The most obvious connective tissue (other than some characters making brief appearances in others’ stories) is that everything takes place in Montana. Beyond that, though, you’ll find that each segment of...

Babak Anvari’s politically and socially minded Iran-set horror film, Under the Shadow, begins atypically for its genre, with lengthy text detailing the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war and the repeated missile strikes the two countries delivered upon one another’s citizens. Set sometime during that...

With Manchester by the Sea, Kenneth Lonergan has made another great film. This one exists somewhere between his intimate debut, You Can Count on Me, and his operatic Margaret in terms of scope but, with its closely observed humanity and consistent levity, Lonergan...

Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin was such a masterful atom bomb of a debut feature that his follow-up was bound to be watched with close scrutiny. With Green Room, he’s made an arguably more conventional thriller but, nevertheless, has announced that he’s a talent who’s...

  There’s a strain of comedy that we’ll call so-dumb-it’s-smart (think Paul Rudd protesting cleaning up his mess in Wet Hot American Summer) that came out of the 90s and early 2000s alt-comedy scene. Jim Hosking’s The Greasy Strangler is a hollow echo...