Sundance film festival: the actor plays a pickpocket who steals from the wrong person in a leisurely, straightforward crime thriller with a sting in its tail

Noah Segan’s light-footed crime noir The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is a film obsessed with the gap between the old and new. There are memories shared about how things used to be, and some older characters refusing to keep up with digital progression, while there are eye-rolls from the younger generation, poking fun at those losing touch with how the world now operates. I’d argue that the theme is often a little overplayed, a classic case of writer-director Segan – a frequent Rian Johnson collaborator – telling rather than showing. But his film makes a convincing case for the old, a brisk throwback to a 70s-era character-led thriller, made with borrowed flair from yesteryear.

The title is itself partly borrowed from a Simon and Garfunkel song and speaks to a protagonist of a dying breed, a pickpocket who prides himself on the old ways; though he might swipe smartphones, he doesn’t own one. He’s played by John Turturro, an actor who hasn’t enjoyed many a lead role of late – his last was in the ill-received Big Lebowski “sequel” The Jesus Rolls and that’s only because he wrote and directed it himself. But this is a welcome step up, or step back up, for someone deserving of something more substantial to tear into. Fittingly, he’s someone who would have arguably had a more prominent career as a leading man in a different time.

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

Sundance film festival: Zoey Deutch is a small-town girl hunting down Jon Hamm for sex in David Wain’s disposable yet often funny lark

There’s been the expected amount of heavy-weighted seriousness at this year’s Sundance – stories about sexual assault, climate change, opioid addiction and dementia – but also a remarkable amount of silliness. Perhaps realising we might be in desperate need of an uplift, the festival has given us a cartoonish dom-sub romance, a killer Barney horror, a pop star mockumentary, a Weekend at Bernie’s art world caper and a film where Olivia Colman shags a man made of wicker. But those films are all pretty stern-minded in comparison to David Wain’s disposable, dopey comedy Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, a film without a single serious moment, driven by the sole purpose of making us laugh.

It succeeds in fits and starts – I laughed more than I have at many a comedy in the past year – but its wild, scattershot humour is so hit and miss, too many jokes going nowhere, that it’s not quite the rousing win I wanted it to be. Wain has previously toyed with more conventional studio comedies like Wanderlust and Role Models (which for me was one of the best examples of the form in the 2000s) and spoofs, targeting 80s sex comedies with Wet Hot American Summer and romcoms with They Came Together. Gail Daughtry belongs in the latter group but it doesn’t have quite as direct of an aim, a Wizard of Oz-inspired, Hollywood-set action comedy about marriage, fame, espionage and the burning desire to have sex with Jon Hamm.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Tape is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

Sundance film festival: strong performances from Kingsley Ben-Adir and Rob Morgan anchor a sensitive film about caregiving as a form of rehabilitation

One of the greatest achievements of a certain kind of Sundance movie is the ability to shine a light on an experience or a community we hadn’t previously been aware of. This year’s stoic and sensitive drama Frank & Louis takes us behind bars, a place we’ve been many times before at this festival, but to shadow the taxing work of inmates taking care of those who have dementia, a specifically difficult job in an already difficult place. Petra Volpe, the Swiss writer-director, who last explored a far more known form of caregiving in Late Shift, an exhausting nursing drama, makes her English-language debut with a film inspired by the “Gold Coats” peer support program at the California Men’s Colony state prison.

As with her previous film, there’s real rigour to how she zeroes in on the grind of under-appreciated labour, but while Late Shift was more naturalistic and experiential, Frank & Louis is far more formulaic and emotional, a clearer bid for the heartstrings. It’s a topic that’s hard not to get emotional about, the slow loss of one’s mental abilities, something many of us might be horribly familiar with, and it’s a tough, rather hopeless experience to witness on screen.

Frank & Louis is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

Sundance film festival: the British actor gives a convincing performance as a man going through the drug court system in a grounded look at rehabilitation

At a festival where the focus is usually on the many micro and macro systemic wrongs in America, there’s something unusually uplifting to find a Serious Issues movie that hinges on something that actually works. Director Adam Meeks came across a rare piece of good news in the hellscape that is the opioid epidemic: the Ohio drug courts that help to rehabilitate addicts through a system of non-judgmental support and a strict, yet not unforgiving, schedule.

His feature debut Union County – an extension of a 2020 short – shows the positive outcome of treating addiction as a problem to be solved, rather than a lifestyle choice to be demonised.

Union County is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

Sundance film festival: the Oscar winner can’t find the right tone for this grating comedy which also wastes Jenna Ortega, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Catherine Zeta-Jones

There’s a mildly amusing on-paper joke at the centre of manic art world comedy The Gallerist: what if someone was accidentally impaled on an exhibit but rather than report it, the corpse became part of the artwork?

Sure, poking fun at the absurdity of modern art might seem a little dated and definitely a little too easy but maybe with a packed cast including Oscar winners Natalie Portman, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, there could be a fun, fast-paced caper here? The answer is a depressing nope, the film a pained and grating misfire played like Weekend at Bernie’s for MoMA members that’s not funny or smart enough to work as farce or satire.

The Gallerist is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution