Sundance Film Festival 2018: movie reviews and news

Infertility is painful and maddening for the couples forced to grapple with it. But in Private Life, writer-director Tamara Jenkins (The Savages) finds humor amid the struggle and uses it as a way to frame a marriage, one that’s become consumed by the attempt to have a child.

The result is a wise, often surprising comedy about pain, love, and makeshift families. It irreverently locates the funny side of the pain — injecting hormones into buttocks, having to deliver semen samples for IVF, readying the house for a home visit from an adoption agency — without making light of those experiences. Private Life is an accessible and complex portrait of two people whose ardent shared desire for a child leads them in some unconventional directions, and it’s a joy to watch whether or not you’ve shared their experience.

Post-apocalyptic stories, as a rule, are less about the end of the world and more about what it really is to be a human. Is it our capacity to think rationally and logically? Our drive to create civilizations? Our creative power? Our self-destructive streak?

Plenty of post-apocalyptic stories have posited answers like those. But two others show up in Reed Morano’s I Think We’re Alone Now: Our humanity lies in our ability to connect with one another, and in our ability (or perhaps inability) to escape the past. The film handles one of those themes more deftly than the other, but in the end it still adds up to an often moving meditation on what it really means to be human, packaged in one of the oldest post-apocalyptic subgenres: the story of the last man on earth.

Look up “bonkers” in any good dictionary and the first entry should be Sorry to Bother You, the loony directorial debut from rapper Boots Riley (best known as frontman of political hip-hop group The Coup). It’s a live-wire comedy with a social conscience, a commentary on race, labor, and American capitalism that veers in so many directions that it’s best to just strap in and let it take you where it wants you to go.

Sorry to Bother You — which brought down the house at its Sundance premiere — is set in a near-future (or maybe alternate-future) Oakland, with only a few dystopic distinctions.

Nonfiction and fiction have always bled into one another on the big screen — movies based on true stories, documentaries with staged scenes — but these days it feels increasingly difficult to separate the two, and sometimes not really worth the effort.

Take Errol Morris’s recent Netflix docuseries Wormwood, which is about half interviews with the son and acquaintances of a man who died under suspicious circumstances, half dreamlike reenactments of the mental state of the man (played by Peter Sarsgaard) before he died. The reenactments are so pervasive and extensive — there are whole scenes with scripted dialogue, rather than just representation of something an interviewee is describing — that Wormwood feels like a truly hybrid work, not easily characterized as anything at all.

Jennifer Fox’s The Tale premiered at Sundance on January 20, a day when women around the world were once again marching following a year of Donald Trump’s presidency as well as the swell of the #MeToo movement.

The first post-Weinstein Sundance included panels and discussions about sexual assault and women in Hollywood. There were visits, too, from attorney Gloria Allred, activist Jane Fonda, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, all subjects of documentaries playing at the festival — the feeling of change was in the air.

The 2018 Sundance Film Festival didn’t yield any true standouts — nothing like last year’s Call Me By Your Name or The Big Sick — but a general lack of buzz doesn’t mean there weren’t plenty of movies worth watching. Horror, high school stories, infertility comedies, post-apocalyptic dramas, and more ensured that the festival was a succession of startling and sometimes unsettling delights.

Here are nine films in particular that we’ll all be talking about later this year.

Documentaries — whether they’re made in the traditional talking-head format or a more experimental mode — are a big part of the Sundance Film Festival’s annual programming lineup, often setting the pace for the year’s most talked-about nonfiction films.

And the 2018 fest yielded a bumper crop of terrific offerings, including a number of lauded biopics about figures like Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late actor Robin Williams, actress and activist Jane Fonda, women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred, and the beloved TV figure Fred Rogers.

The Bisbee ‘17 score sounds ripped from a ghost movie, spiky and glassy and a little dissonant. That sort of music (composed here by Keegan DeWitt) feels unusual for a documentary, but Bisbee ‘17 is no ordinary documentary, and the eerie, jagged notes underline that fact.

Directed by unconventional documentarian Robert Greene, Bisbee ‘17 is a fierce, lyrical probe into the soul of a town haunted by a history it would rather forget. It’s also an unsettling cipher for America, in a year when the ghosts of our past revealed themselves in frightening ways.