Sundance 2018: Reviews and news from the premier independent-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 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

In October of last year, just days after several women accused producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, his frequent collaborator Woody Allen expressed fears of a “witch hunt atmosphere” for men. Countless people have since called the #MeToo movement that followed a “witch hunt,” a piece of hyperbole that equates powerful men losing jobs to mass executions.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally posted after the film’s premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, where it played under the title Search. It has been updated for the film’s wide theatrical release.

In 2015, the movie Unfriended landed in theaters, telling a conventional supernatural revenge story with an unconventional conceit: the entire film took place on the screen of one character’s laptop. That approach really shouldn’t have worked, but Unfriended was nevertheless a creepy, unsettling, low-budget success. When I spoke with producer Timur Bekmambetov at the time, he envisioned “screen movies” as an entire genre.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review was originally posted after the film’s premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. It has been updated to reflect the film’s HBO release.

Viewers can be forgiven for smirking at the seeming double entendre in the title of Marina Zenovich’s HBO documentary Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind. It’s not just that we live in an age of off-color call-and-response, where “That’s what s/he said” and “69? Nice” have become conversational reflexes. It’s just natural to assume that any seeming vulgarity in Williams’ humor is entirely intentional, given how often his routines centered around genitals and their unpredictable behavior. Zenovich’s doc features plenty of footage of Williams onstage, improvising riffs about removing his penis and taking it to a bar so he can engage it in frank conversation, or snaking a hand between Billy Crystal’s legs onstage and pretending his arm is Crystal’s active, talkative cock. The title just seems like one more Robin Williams gag, half joke and half friendly sexual come-on.

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 Hereditary’s debut at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. It has been updated to coincide with the film’s theatrical release.

For the past several years, theater owners have been visibly struggling to find gimmicks to keep film lovers from abandoning movie theaters in favor of their own audiovisual setups at home. The rise of 3D and 4D films, the movement toward luxury seating and gourmet food in theaters, the push toward higher technical standards — they’re all aimed at increasing the value of the moviegoing experience. But theater owners could opt for a much lower-tech solution: just program a lot more horror movies like Ari Aster’s terrifying feature debut, Hereditary.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

In spite of all the focus on gender inequity in the film and TV industry over the past few years, the discrepancies are still dire. The visibility of the #MeToo movement and the sexual-abuse scandals that have rocked Hollywood may give the impression that women are making gains in the industry, but statistics still show them sliding backward in terms of representation: recent numbers show that half the students at the major film schools are women, but 91 percent of studio movies are still directed by men. And every study on the subject suggests widespread discrimination against women in terms of pay rates, hiring rates, and awards recognition.

Independent filmmakers don’t have a lot of security, but they do have a certain amount of freedom. Working outside the studio system, often on shoestring budgets and on personal projects, they have more leeway to barf their ids up onto the screen, sometimes with deeply bizarre results. The majority of the feature-length independent movies and VR projects that hit the Sundance Film Festival every year are looking for some form of traditional distribution, and are designed to appeal to some form of mass audience. And then there are the intensely idiosyncratic projects, the ones with feces-smeared dog-women and undulating ritualistic god-cats. Those are the ones we often remember from year to year, whether we want to, or whether we’ve been through intense therapy to forget them. Once again, we’re taking stock of the most startling moments we experienced at this year’s Sundance.

At least one audience member, by their own admission, bought a ticket to Cory McAbee’s Sundance premiere of Deep Astronomy and the Romantic Sciences under the assumption that McAbee was planning an actual astronomy lecture. They were moderately startled when he jumped onstage with a musical sales pitch for something called the “Small Star Corporation,” a fictional company that can help ordinary people navigate everything from accidental drifts across dimensions to the process of efficiently recycling their corpse. Deep Astronomy is part of a collaborative, multi-year guerrilla filmmaking project based on talks McAbee has given around the world. (McAbee is also the creator of the bizarre cult science fiction film The American Astronaut, which is very useful context for his latest show.) As a discrete performance art piece, it’s like a cross between a highly cerebral stand-up comedy routine and an art-rock concert, with monologues ranging from pure absurdism to poignant musings on death and time. —Adi Robertson

Every January, cinema fans don their boots and heavy coats, gear up for extensive line-standing and bus-waiting, and flock to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival. Founded in 1978, Sundance has become America’s biggest independent film festival, and it’s often the launch point for films from around the world that were made outside the studio system, and are looking for recognition and distribution deals. Some years, Sundance has a bigger impact than other years. 2017’s lineup saw the premieres (and sales) of breakout hits like Call Me By Your Name and The Big Sick, in addition to gems like A Ghost Story, Brigsby Bear, and Ingrid Goes West. 2018 was a lower-key year, but it had its share of well-received hits and instant sales, and it remains an annual focal point for cinema fans who want an advance look at some of the more idiosyncratic, daring movies coming to theaters or streaming services later in the year. Here are our favorite films from this year’s festival.

Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow is a great cult film, but not a particularly accessible one. So I’m thrilled to see a follow-up like Mandy, which pairs its fever-dream aesthetic with an actually comprehensible plot and intense performances from Nicolas Cage and Andrea Riseborough. Mandy amps up the tension between a happy couple and a murderous cult in a remote wilderness setting, before letting it all loose in a ridiculous but satisfying revenge quest. It maintains a sense of humor that’s based largely on the contrast between the film’s overall ominous atmosphere and Cage’s over-the-top action-movie setpieces. But even its most ridiculous elements — like a gang of Cenobite-like bikers whose powers come from LSD, or a chainsaw duel — are played straight enough that they don’t fall into camp. The tone underscores Mandy’s symbolic battle between blind mysticism and a self-aware love of the fantastical, while making for a gory, solidly enjoyable midnight movie. Mandy was produced by XYZ Films (Beyond Skyline, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore), which seems set to self-distribute the film, so it’s likely to be out later this year. —Adi Robertson

One of the most buzzed-about films at the 2018 Sundance film festival was Ari Aster’s unsettling writing and directing debut Hereditary, a horror film starring Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, and Milly Shapiro as a family haunted by their past. Or more accurately, haunted by their creepy dead grandmother. Or more accurately than that, haunted by things that should not be spoiled. Critics nearly universally praised Hereditary as shocking and terrifying, leading to some skeptical backlash from horror fans who felt burned by similar advance praise for films like The Witch and It Comes At Night, two extremely tense horror films in which not a whole lot ultimately happens.

Well, now Hereditary has its first trailer, which makes it pretty evident that this film has a lot more grim action than either of those movies. Judge for yourself. The best thing about this trailer is that it’s cleverly misleading in all the right ways, so even if you think you’re being spoiled about a plot point, you’re probably not — which won’t keep you from getting the gist and tone of the movie, but will leave a lot of surprises.

fThe Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier experimental section featured its first virtual reality experience in 2012, and with every festival, its projects have grown longer and more sophisticated. This year was no exception. The program included more than 20 virtual and augmented reality entries, ranging from simple mobile 360-degree video to multi-person performance art installations.

Many of these pieces came from well-known figures in the VR film and art world, attached to studios like Within, Felix & Paul, and Oculus. But 2018 also saw strong projects from relative newcomers, and a couple of absences, including Nonny de la Peña, who created the first Sundance-selected VR piece and has been featured at the festival multiple times since then. This year, people used familiar formats for more sophisticated storytelling, while others channeled newer ideas like multi-person VR and haptics into crowd-pleasing experiments. Here are some of the best.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

There’s a world in which Stranger Things doesn’t exist and the latest adaptation of Stephen King’s It didn’t just become a huge horror movie success. In that alternate timeline, the emergence of a film set in 1984 about a group of four high school kids trying to solve a local murder mystery — replete with burbling synthesizer score and pop-culture references — would likely be seen as a clever, inventive piece of retro nostalgia.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

In the world of YouTube videography, a genre known for filter-free lifelogging, Poppy — the incredibly popular stage persona of 23-year-old Moriah Pereira — is a unique and mysterious figure. Poppy’s soft-spoken, doll-like mannerisms oscillate between cute and creepy. Her videos mix inane repetition (one of the most famous is 10 minutes of her saying “I’m Poppy” in different tones) with occult symbolism and unsettling references to death, violence, and hidden but powerful forces outside the bounds of Poppy’s featureless white stage.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

The story of murderer Lizzie Borden is best known from the ill-advised children’s rhyme, but at Sundance 2018, she’s been given a more thoughtful, biopic-style treatment with the film Lizzie. Directed by Craig William Macneill (Channel Zero) and starring Chloë Sevigny, the film pulls from historical accounts while also expounding on Borden’s story with some hypothetical could-have-been plot developments, in the name of giving some sense and purpose to the brutal crimes.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

Over the past decade, the world post-apocalypse has become a familiar setting, with numerous movies and TV shows exploring what happens to people when the order and structure of society falls down around them. For her newest film, I Think We’re Alone Now, director Reed Morano (The Handmaid’s Tale) jumps into that setting with both feet, telling the story of a man (Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage) who’s enjoyed his contented, solitary last-man-on-Earth life — until it’s upended by the appearance of a young woman (Elle Fanning).

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

The short virtual reality film BattleScar starts before you even put on the headset. In Sundance’s experimental New Frontier section, viewers enter a booth that’s been transformed into a teen girl’s bedroom, circa 1978. A mattress sits on the floor, littered with a leather jacket and high boots. One wall has PUNK slashed in straight black lines. Beneath that, in smaller script: was invented by girls. The design is clearly conveying defiance, but with 40 years of hindsight, the aesthetic is comfortingly familiar.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

Director Panos Cosmatos once said that his 2010 debut film Beyond the Black Rainbow was “a sort of imagining of an old film that doesn’t exist,” inspired by a childhood obsession with the box art of horror movies he wasn’t allowed to watch. His new follow-up Mandy, which Cosmatos describes as a “companion piece” to Black Rainbow, feels like a pulpier and more self-aware exploration of the same premise — with a strong helping of Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

We’re in a cultural moment where the impact of social media isn’t something that we just notice when we catch ourselves heads-down in our phones or computers. It’s something that’s underscored with almost daily news stories, with each new revelation seemingly more sinister than the last. It’s so ever-present that it can be easy to tune out, which makes the Sundance documentary The Cleaners pack such a devastating wallop.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

When filmmakers turn their cameras on themselves and their families, the results are rarely as fascinating to the viewers as they are to the participants. Family documentaries come with a lot of emotional baggage that the audience doesn’t get to share, and while it’s possible to get a broad overview of a family’s dynamics, the full background and context is always going to elude outsiders. There are exceptions to the rule, like Sarah Polley’s unfolding-mystery doc Stories We Tell, or Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s animated personal history Persepolis. But too many “me and my family” docs mistake personal interest for public interest.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

The unspoken hope of attending a film festival like Sundance is that you could just stumble upon some small, incredibly effective film that might otherwise have never crossed your radar. That’s precisely the case with The Guilty, an engrossing Danish thriller from first-time feature director Gustav Möller that’s playing in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition category.

What does it mean to befriend a fictional character? How should you be able to interact with them, and how should they respond to you? And can virtual reality help the process, by immersing you in their world?

These are a few of the questions nascent VR studio Fable began asking when developing Wolves in the Walls, an experience premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. Wolves in the Walls adapts Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s eponymous children’s book, where a girl named Lucy becomes convinced there are wolves in her house’s walls. (Spoiler: there are.) In the first of three short episodes, she paces her attic looking for evidence that might convince her family. Her world is colorful and a little cartoonish, with moments that are even more stylized: as she’s explaining the existence of the wolves, the scene cuts to something like a three-dimensional chalkboard, with pictures drawn in a child’s hand.

Former members of Oculus Story Studio, the cinematic virtual reality team that closed last year, are founding a new studio known as Fable. Fable’s inaugural project is a VR adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s children’s book The Wolves in the Walls. The piece started at Story Studio, and the first of its three episodes will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this week. Fable is working on four future projects that will explore different elements of VR storytelling, and they’re being made inside VR as well, using tools like Oculus’ illustration program Quill.

Fable is co-founded by Edward Saatchi, who previously co-founded Story Studio, and Pete Billington, the director of Wolves in the Walls. The studio’s head of creative production is Jessica Yaffa Shamash. With the exception of Wolves, they’re focusing on “made in VR” projects created by small teams.