Sundance film festival: A desperate wannabe attaches himself to a singer on the rise in a darkly compelling breakout from Alex Russell, writer for Beef and The Bear

There’s something remarkably assured about Alex Russell’s attention-demanding thriller Lurker, a buzzy Sundance debut that’s made with an unusual amount of self-awareness. The majority of this year’s first-time narrative films have been cursed with an overabundance of either in-your-face style or precariously stacked ideas (or, even worse, both) and a frantic need to show how much one can do, often showcasing how little can be done well.

But Russell, a TV writer whose credits include Beef and The Bear, is the rare freshman who knows exactly the right balance, often choosing less when others choose too much, his film a relatively simple yet extremely confident introduction. It’s a contemporary pop-culture riff on an obsessive psycho-thriller, the kind we were flooded with in the 90s in which an outlier enters the life of someone who has something they want, recalling Single White Female and The Talented Mr Ripley as well as something more recent and comedic like Ingrid Goes West. Russell takes this formula and extracts most, if not all, of the heightened genre elements to give us something a little more grounded, dialogue more rooted in reality and a canny realisation that murder isn’t always needed to create menace.

Lurker is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

This brash debut with Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher is slickly made but it’s not as clever or original as it thinks it is

Imagine, if you will, a skewed sci-fi reality that envisions a Black Mirror episode but for an entire movie? Can you even begin to grasp what that would look like? Maybe you can if in the last few years you’ve seen Foe or Fingernails or Don’t Worry Darling or Swan Song or Love Me or The Pod Generation or The Substance or Possessor or any one of the many attempts to recall the magic of at least some of the sci-fi anthology’s earlier episodes. It’s not as if the Charlie Brooker-created series was the first to spin “what if?” nightmares from the dangers of tech but its stickiness has had a noticeable effect on younger creators eager to Say Something about the times we live in.

Companion, a wink-wink pre-Valentine’s sci-fi comedy, is not just part of that trend but also belongs at the back of the long line of post-Get Out social thrillers, standing behind Fresh and Blink Twice, using an outlandish conceit to comment on something we’re all too aware of. The film, from the first-time writer-director Drew Hancock, is an attempt to skewer a certain, familiar type of shitty guy whose outward nice bro persona betrays a corroded and controlling core. He’s played by Jack Quaid, son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, who has cleverly turned his handsome and charming nepo baby privilege into something ultimately petulant and pathetic. It worked well as one of the Reddit-pilled killers in Scream 5 and works well here too, even if his character feels a little under-baked.

With nominations led by Beyoncé and Charli xcx, the event will serve a dual-purpose by acknowledging the devastating wildfires in California

• Grammy awards 2025: list of nominees

A “very different” Grammy awards will take place in Los Angeles this weekend, impacted by the recent wildfires that have affected California.

The annual celebration of music, taking place at the Crypto.com arena on Sunday, will still feature a range of big-name performers but there will be a noticeable shift in purpose.

A pair of duelling weddings leads to war in this surprisingly funny, if a little overstuffed, Amazon comedy

In the doldrums of January, with Hollywood gracelessly dumping its shoddiest films, one would have understandable scepticism over Amazon’s glossy wedding confection You’re Cordially Invited. Recent attempts to replicate the big studio comedy for a streaming audience have almost all failed, from the intolerable Vacation Friends movies to Amazon’s heinous Space Cadet to joyless big-star Netflix vehicles like the recent Diaz/Foxx mess Back in Action. Even its stars have tried – Reese Witherspoon with charmless rom-com Your Place or Mine and Will Ferrell with grating Christmas musical Spirited – so expectations weren’t just low, they were deep underground.

It also didn’t help that Amazon refused to provide screeners to press, a clear sign that something was up. But even with the many low bars this would all put in place, there’s a surprising amount of low-rent fun to be had here, a simple and silly crowd-pleaser smartly reliant on the high wattage appeal of two, top-of-game professionals. Maybe my enjoyment was also boosted by something else, an ongoing frustration with the industry’s inability to crown a new generation of not just legitimate movie stars but legitimate comedy stars (they seem to exist more on the outskirts now, supporting actors who are in desperate need of it).

The Oscar-nominated star of Netflix’s musical made racist and Islamophobic remarks in several tweets from 2020

Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón is under fire after old tweets uncovered a range of troubling opinions on subjects including Islam and George Floyd.

The Spanish actor, who recently became the first ever openly transgender person to receive an acting nomination at the Oscars, has since deleted a number of tweets after users, including writer Sarah Hagi, uncovered them. Variety and the Hollywood Reporter have since reported the news and translated older posts.

Sundance film festival: The cult of celebrity is targeted in a progressively nonsensical and poorly made debut with too much on its plate

Anyone who has written about a much-loved music star with even the vaguest hint of light criticism will be aware of the horrors that can often follow. The tribal intensity of extremely online and extremely sensitive fandoms can lead to either a mild torrent of more tolerable abuse or something far darker, like death threats and sometimes doxing, an unending rage erupting from people who use emojis as avatars. There’s a great thriller to be made about this unpleasant tension, the fans who will do anything for their idol and the idol who will do nothing to stop them, but Opus, a poppy new A24 misfire premiering at Sundance, is not that movie.

It’s the first film from the writer-director Mark Anthony Green, who, like many before him, is so fixated on what he wants to say that he hasn’t been able to figure out how to say it. There’s maybe a slicker, simpler and more satisfying murder mystery to be told here – an assortment of media types picked off one-by-one at the remote ranch of a reclusive pop star – but he’s challenged himself with something far harder and ultimately too far out of his reach.