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      Sundance Documentaries: ‘Eternal You,’ ‘Ibelin’ and More

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      Festival documentaries ranged across the genre map, but several explored the lengths we’ll go to communicate with lost loved ones.Everyone from the academy to streaming services splits cinema into two buckets: movies (comedy, romance, horror, whatever) and documentaries, lumped into one unholy pile. Besides being obviously reductive, the division is false: Nonfiction movies can be comedies or romances or horror or any other genre, and they can create new indescribable genres, too. But American audiences still tend to be fed documentaries of only a few types: true crime stories, cult exposés, hagiographies, and educational disquisitions full of talking heads.There’s more than that to nonfiction. And though plenty of star-driven, lightweight biographies show up at Sundance — famous folk on the carpet create much-needed social-media attention — there’s a lot of other nonfiction on offer, some of which will make its way to theaters and streaming services over the next year or two. A couple of lucky films may even eventually make their way into Oscar contention.Documentaries at this year’s Sundance, which concluded Sunday, ranged across the genre map, often playfully mixing up conventions. But it was striking how often a particular thread kept popping up: the human longing to communicate with the dead, and the lengths — technological and otherwise — to which we’ll go to make it happen.That was the theme of “Love Machina” and “Eternal You,” which feel picked by the programmers to complement one another. “Love Machina” (directed by Peter Sillen) is a romance looking at the efforts of the married couple Martine and Bina Rothblatt to create a robotic replica of Bina, powered by artificial intelligence and an extensive database of her thoughts, speech and emotions, that can communicate with her descendants when she is gone. “Eternal You” (directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck) takes a broader, more analytical look at the burgeoning market for “afterlife technology” designed to do what the Rothblatts hope to accomplish: let people communicate with their loved ones after death using A.I. If that sounds like a “Black Mirror” episode, you’re right — and some “Eternal You” participants note the humanity-altering danger in this quest.In “Love Machina,” the robotic likeness of a woman is part of an effect to communicate with her descendants after she’s gone.Peter Sillen, via Sundance InstituteYet, as the eminent sociologist Sherry Turkle points out onscreen, what we see in these efforts is A.I. offering what religion once did: a sense of an afterlife, a quest for meaning, the feeling of connecting to transcendence. One of the festival’s best documentaries, the sociological portrait “Look Into My Eyes,” taps into this same longing from a more mystical direction. Directed by Lana Wilson, the film drops audiences into the lives of several New York City psychics. The clients are hoping to communicate with the beloved dead through a literal rather than technological medium. (One participant helps people communicate with their pets, some of whom are still living.) But the focus is on the psychics themselves, the reasons they’ve come to their work, and what they believe they’re actually doing in their sessions — and the film is marvelously nuanced and fascinating in its examination. Is this performance? Is it “real”? And if it brings peace to the living, does it matter?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Jake Johnson Likes to Play the Hollywood Game, Especially When It Changes

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      “When you get on this roller coaster, you don’t know how long you’re going to be allowed to play while you’re here,” the “New Girl” actor said about his filmmaking debut, “Self Reliance.”If you were bored enough — a stultifying job, living with Mom after a bad breakup — you, too, might climb into a mysterious limo carrying Andy Samberg. You might even consider the offer: outwit assassins for 30 days and win $1 million.It’s a risk that Tommy, played by Jake Johnson, is willing to take in “Self Reliance,” the dark comedy on Hulu that he also wrote and directed.Johnson, 45, was antsy during the pandemic when he decided the time for this project was now.“When you get on this roller coaster, you don’t know how long you’re going to be allowed to play while you’re here,” he said in a video interview from the studio he built for podcasts and Zoom calls in his Pasadena, Calif., home. “You should take chances and experiment. And if you have a relationship with an audience, you should be presenting new options.”Johnson is best known as an actor in movies and television, particularly the sitcom “New Girl,” which ran for seven seasons and is one of the reasons Anna Kendrick and Samberg agreed to come aboard “Self Reliance.”“Having somebody as funny as him start the movie, it sets the tone in the way that I want this movie to be viewed,” Johnson said before talking about losing at chess, carpentry mishaps and out-of-this-world restaurants. “And that is: sit back, have a glass of wine or smoke a joint or whatever you like to do and enjoy it. It’s a ride.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1My Twin DaughtersWhen I had kids, they become such a dominant part of my life. They transform every day, every thought. So the idea of living without them — I don’t even know what living is.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      David J. Skal, Scholar Who Took Horror Seriously, Dies at 71

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      In books like “The Monster Show” and “Screams of Reason,” he examined the cultural significance of movies meant to scare the bejesus out of people.David J. Skal, a witty historian of horror entertainment who found in movies like “Dracula” and “Rosemary’s Baby” both a mirror of evolving societal fears and a pressure-release valve for those anxieties, died on Jan. 1 in a car accident in Los Angeles. He was 71.Mr. Skal was returning home after a movie and early dinner with his longtime partner, Robert Postawko, when an oncoming vehicle crossed a median and hit their car, said Malaga Baldi, Mr. Skal’s literary agent. Mr. Postawko was badly injured but survived the crash.Mr. Skal was an author with encyclopedic knowledge of a subject not always taken seriously — movies meant to scare the bejesus out of people — whose erudition, combined with a chatty writing style, made his books lively and entertaining.As an evangelist for horror, he was a regular guest on NPR, explicating frightful topics in a sonorous and friendly voice, and a consultant to Universal Studios for a theme park ride in Florida, “Halloween Horror Nights.” He also added commentary tracks to Universal’s DVD series of classic monster movies, from “Dracula” (1931) to “Creature From the Black Lagoon” (1954).“One of the major functions that monsters provide for us is they let us process our fears about the real world without having to look at them too directly,” he told The New York Times in 2014.He could riff in his writings on the cultural theories of Susan Sontag, Lionel Trilling and R.D. Laing. But his own critiques were never stuffy, grounded as they were in his personal fandom for a genre he first encountered as a boy living outside Cleveland. His first movie memory was watching “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” on television.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Why the Documentary Oscar Race Is the Most Unpredictable One

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      All five nominees are international features focused on geopolitical events, and three are directed by women.Most post-nomination Oscar chatter focuses on surprises and snubs connected to the fiction nominees. But I’m a nonfiction nerd, so for me the documentaries are where it’s at, and in recent years, the picks have grown delightfully unpredictable. This year, two seeming slam dunks were left off the list: “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” and “American Symphony,” about the musician Jon Batiste. Both are artful, and their nominations had seemed assured because, at least in the past, well-made portraits tended to get eyeballs and thus votes.But here we are, in a strange new world. Biographical documentaries are still hugely popular; next to true crime, they’re what’s hot in nonfiction right now, as our recently reviewed releases “June” and “Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero” indicate. This time around, though, the voters cast their net more widely.Much more widely, in fact. Don’t look now, but this may be the most groundbreaking category at the awards. All five are international films, centering mostly on geopolitical situations. Three are directed by women. And all five are also, as it happens, very good.“The Eternal Memory,” a second nomination for the Chilean director Maite Alberdi (her first was “The Mole Agent”), landed on my Top 10 list last year. (Stream it on Paramount+.) It deals with the erasure of public memory in Chile, refracted through the relationship of one couple: the prominent cultural journalist Augusto Gongora and his wife, Paulina Urrutia, as she cares for him after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. (Gongora died last May.)The nomination of “Four Daughters” made its Tunisian director, Kaouther Ben Hania, the first Arab woman to be nominated twice at the Oscars. (Her first, “The Man Who Sold His Skin,” was nominated for best international feature.) “Four Daughters” (for rent on most major platforms and streaming here) explores radicalization in a single Tunisian family and uses unexpected techniques, like having actors play out scenes in the family’s life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      2024 Sundance Film Festival: Will Ferrell Documentary and More

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      A documentary about Will Ferrell and his friend Harper Steele brought the house down. It was just one of several discoveries at this year’s festival.On Tuesday, after days of tramping around Park City, Utah, griping about the movies and the logistical headaches this mountain resort town presents, I was transported into the Sundance Film Festival that I always hope for, the one in which a movie surprises and moves and maybe delights me, and so successfully makes good on its promise that, after the lights come up, the crowd delivers the festival version of hallelujah with a floor-shaking standing ovation. I admit, I wasn’t expecting that to happen when I walked into the new Will Ferrell joint.That would be “Will & Harper,” a documentary by Josh Greenbaum in which Ferrell and his longtime friend Harper Steele, a trans woman, set off on a momentous cross-country journey of discovery. Former colleagues at “Saturday Night Live,” where Steele was a head writer, they have collaborated on other Ferrell vehicles, including the Spanish-language comedy “Casa de Mi Padre.” Here, prompted by love and interest — Steele yearns to feel more at ease in public, Ferrell wants to support and understand his friend’s transition — they deepen their friendship while traveling through a predictably divided country.Like many, if not most, of the movies on this year’s slate, “Will & Harper” will probably make its way into theaters and onto streaming. I hope that’s the case for another movie about trans identity: Jules Rosskam’s “Desire Lines,” a low-budget documentary that doesn’t have star power, just heart and intelligence. It deserves more attention than, say, “It’s What’s Inside,” Greg Jardin’s gimmicky, ugly-looking and unscary horror movie, which Netflix bought for an eye-popping $17 million. Splashy festival deals like this one generate a lot of noise but there’s always much behind-the-scenes haggling, so I’m hopeful that “Desire Lines” and some of the other lower-radar selections will reach a larger audience.Aden Hakimi and Theo Germain in “Desire Lines,” directed by Jules Rosskam.Marie Hinson, via Sundance InstituteMovie love is why tens of thousands of attendees continue to gather at Sundance, which ends on Sunday. With 91 features on the slate, the program was somewhat more streamlined this year than in recent editions; in 2023, it presented 110 features. The smaller lineup and reduced number of Park City theaters suggested that the rumors about the festival having some serious money issues were true. It also made me wonder if this time the festival really was going to leave Park City. When I asked Eugene Hernandez, the festival’s director, whether the event was moving, he answered, “Park City is our home, Utah is our home.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘In the Summers’ and ’Didi’ Among 2024 Sundance Film Festival Winners

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      The jury focused largely on under-the-radar titles, though a Jesse Eisenberg-Kieran Culkin collaboration also was recognized.“In the Summers,” an independent film about two sisters navigating fraught summer visits with their father, won the top prize in the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. dramatic competition on Friday. The movie also won the competition’s directing award for its first-time filmmaker, Alessandra Lacorazza.“This film snuck up on us,” read a citation delivered by the jury, which was made up of the director Debra Granik, the cartoonist Adrian Tomine and the producer Lena Waithe. “A film like this can easily slip through the cracks, and for that reason we have chosen to shed light on this beautiful piece of cinema and we hope it finds the audience it so well deserves.”That appeared to be the animating ethos for many of the jury’s picks, which went to worthy but lower-profile entries in competition, though the screenwriting award was given to Jesse Eisenberg for his buzzy comedy, “A Real Pain,” a road-trip movie he directed and starred in alongside Kieran Culkin. The film sold to Searchlight for $10 million in one of the festival’s biggest deals.Audience awards voted on by festival attendees went to the likes of “Didi,” a teen coming-of-age movie from Sean Wang, the documentary “Daughters,” about four girls attending a daddy-daughter dance with their imprisoned fathers, and the Irish rap movie “Kneecap.”Here are the rest of the top awards. For a complete list of winners, including short films and special jury prizes, go to sundance.org.Grand Jury PrizesU.S. Dramatic Competition: “In the Summers”U.S. Documentary Competition: “Porcelain War”World Cinema Dramatic Competition: “Sujo”World Cinema Documentary Competition: “A New Kind of Wilderness”Next Innovator Award: “Little Death”Directing, U.S. Dramatic: Alessandra Lacorazza, “In The Summers”Directing, U.S. Documentary: Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, “Sugarcane”Directing, World Cinema Dramatic: Raha Amirfazli and Alireza Ghasemi, “In the Land Of Brothers”Directing, World Cinema Documentary: Benjamin Ree, “Ibelin”Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: U.S. Dramatic: Jesse Eisenberg, “A Real Pain”Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award, U.S. Documentary: Carla Gutiérrez, “Frida”Audience AwardsFestival Favorite Award: “Daughters”U.S. Dramatic Competition: “Didi”U.S. Documentary Competition: “Daughters”World Cinema Dramatic Competition: “Girls Will Be Girls”World Cinema Documentary Competition: “Ibelin”Next: “Kneecap” More

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      Malia Obama Debuts Short Film at Sundance Film Festival

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      The former first daughter’s short, “The Heart,” focuses on a sensitive man racked with guilt when his mother dies after they have an argument.If you’re a celebrity seeking to rebrand, the Sundance Film Festival can offer a useful assist. From Marvel superheroes seeking an indie turn to teenage movie stars hoping to segue into spicy adult roles, the snowy event is the perfect place to debut a new direction.This year’s big rebrand was so skillfully executed that many people I ran into here at Sundance didn’t even know it had happened at all. If they had, we might have gotten a mob scene at one of the typically sedate short-film showcases, where an 18-minute project called “The Heart” premiered from a fledgling filmmaker credited as Malia Ann, though she’s much better known as Malia Obama, the daughter of the former president.Now 25, Obama is no Hollywood neophyte: After interning at the Weinstein Company in 2017, she studied filmmaking at Harvard as a visual and environmental studies major and then, upon graduation, wrote for the Amazon series “Swarm.” That show was cocreated by Donald Glover, who also served as executive producer of “The Heart” and has been helping to steer Obama’s nascent career: “The first thing we did was talk about the fact that she will only get to do this once,” Glover told GQ last year. “You’re Obama’s daughter. So if you make a bad film, it will follow you around.”That’s not a fate likely to befall “The Heart,” a well-shot and spare debut. Effectively a two-hander, the short stars singer-actor Tunde Adebimpe as Joshua, a sensitive man who still lives with his mother (LaTonya Borsay). After they have a passive-aggressive fight about the groceries and share a silent, side-by-side TV dinner, Joshua goes upstairs for a shower. Minutes later, his mother clutches her chest, collapses to the floor and dies alone.Tunde Adebimpe in a scene from “The Heart.”Sundance InstituteRacked with guilt, Joshua finds it hard to move on, not least because he must now carry around a jar containing his mother’s preserved heart, as per her will. But he gets a second chance of sorts when he encounters a stranger on the street who looks just like his departed mother. Determined to say the things he never got to tell her when she was alive, Joshua ultimately learns that maybe he should go a little bit easier on himself.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Mutt,’ ‘Unpregnant’ and More Streaming Gems

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      The complexities of 21st-century romantic entanglements are front and center in this month’s roundup of hidden gems on your subscription streaming services.‘Mutt’ (2023)Stream it on Netflix.Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s micro-budget New York drama is everything indie movies are supposed to be: keenly observed and modestly executed, telling us a story and showing us a world we don’t usually see in mainstream cinema. In this case, it’s the world of Feña (Lío Mehiel), a transgender man and a semi-desperate pseudo-hustler whose life goes momentarily topsy-turvy when he accidentally reconnects with a former boyfriend from before his transition. Every performer is on point, natural and credible, and the screenplay is lived-in and mostly devoid of histrionics (Feña gives a big speech to his dad about how difficult it all is, and it’s the single false note, the only scene that feels like a scene from a movie instead of a scene from real life). This is a small film, but a mighty one.‘Unpregnant’ (2020)Stream it on Max.When this Max original debuted in 2020, its story — of a young woman (Haley Lu Richardson, “The White Lotus”) inviting her former BFF (Barbie Ferreira, “Euphoria”) on an impromptu road trip to a state that doesn’t require parental consent for an abortion — felt a bit less urgent. In this post-Dobbs world, in which such journeys have become necessary even for some adults, the picture’s light tone and comic beats could seem to make light of a serious situation. But the co-writer and director Rachel Lee Goldenberg balances these trick tones with aplomb, primarily focusing on the splintered (but repairable) friendship between these disparate women, without trivializing the motivation for their reunion. The result is a sharp but likable road movie, and a fine showcase for two charismatic performers.‘Crush’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.The filmmaker Sammi Cohen, who had a popular hit on Netflix with last year’s Adam Sandler (and family) vehicle “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” directs this delightfully frisky queer teen sex comedy. Rowan Blanchard is Paige, split between two potential romantic interests: the popular Gabriela (Isabella Ferreira) and the introverted AJ (Auli‘i Cravalho), who also, inconveniently enough, happen to be sisters. Though contemporary in its setting and sexual politics, “Crush” betrays Cohen’s love for ’90s teen comedies of the “Clueless” ilk, borrowing their candy-colored aesthetics as well as their knowing and occasionally adult-oriented sense of humor. Blanchard is a charming anchor, Ferreira a memorable counterpoint and Cravalho, currently brightening up “Mean Girls” and best known to younger viewers for voicing “Moana,” is one of the most exciting young actors on the scene.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More