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).

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.

Prequel focuses on xenophobia in turn-of-the-century San Francisco with surprising wit and silliness

This prequel to the huge-grossing Detective Chinatown franchise, though focused on anti-Chinese xenophobia in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, manages to be a rare example of a Sino-blockbuster not filled with maudlin patriotism; it mostly carries its cultural message charmingly and with plenty of self-deprecating humour. At one point, an imperial Chinese investigator toughs it out in order to form an alliance with a gaggle of Irish hoodlums straight from Gangs of New York. “You held yourself so well back there,” his underlings congratulate him, before their leader’s legs give out. “Don’t let the Americans see. I’m about to pee myself!”

The story here is that malevolent forces are stirring the great American melting pot. The son of local Tong leader Bai Xuanling (Chow Yun-fat, still with charisma on tap) is arrested for the murder of the daughter of racist Republican congressman Grant (John Cusack), so the former sends for wunderkind sleuth Qin Fu (Haoran Liu) – apparently deputised by the actual Sherlock Holmes – to get his kid off the hook. Also killed the same night was a Native American elder, whose son Gui (Baoquiang Wang) swears revenge and becomes pig-tailed Watson to Fu’s junior Holmes. No explanation (at first) for why he can speak fluent Hebei dialect.

Undistracted by smartphones in 1995, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy talk away one night in Vienna without resolution but with huge charm

Not a romcom, not a romantic drama, but just … a romance, a brief encounter on a train without heartache, a strange and wonderful moment-by-moment miracle that never seems cloying or absurd. Richard Linklater’s film from 1995 is now re-released for its 30th anniversary, a stretch of time that gives us a chance to ponder the characters’ time-travel musings about their future selves. The two sequels Before Sunset (in 2004) and Before Midnight (in 2013) famously reunited the leads and gave us an episodic study of their growing old as a couple welded together by that amazing moment in Vienna; it was an ambitious approach which Linklater brought to its fullest success with his time-lapse portrait Boyhood, which he was working on around the same period.

The goateed and sweetly conceited twentysomething Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke, is on a train to Vienna when the smart and beautiful Céline, insouciantly played by Julie Delpy, sits down opposite him and they start talking. Everyone is reading books and even newspapers in 1995, not looking at phones, or posting Instagram selfies – so striking up flirtatious conversations is not quite as difficult, but still a gamble; you can feel Jesse’s heart-thumping nerves as he suggests to Céline that she forget about her plans to go to Paris and instead get off the train with him to hang out in Vienna for 24 hours – with no money for a hotel, literally wandering around with him all night, never revealing their surnames.

The story of the first episode of Saturday Night Live is an exhaustingly frantic, dull dramedy that even the show’s biggest superfan would struggle to watch

Even the superest superfan of the legendary US TV comedy show Saturday Night Live is going to struggle with the unbearable self-indulgence and self-adoration of this exhausting film from director and co-writer Jason Reitman.

It’s a frantically dull dramedy about the supposedly adorable chaos that attended the show’s first ever live broadcast in 1975, with all the iconic players including Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), and Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris). For some obscure and not obviously funny reason Nicholas Braun plays both Jim Henson (of Muppets fame) and Andy Kaufman, and Gabriel LaBelle plays the show’s presiding producer-genius Lorne Michaels, who announces that his experimental comedy wackfest is “the first television show by and for the generation who grew up watching television”.

Sundance film festival: In her feature debut, writer-director Eva Victor depicts the aftermath of sexual assault with striking naturalism and surprising grace

By now, a full week into Sundance, it is clear that the indie film festival is in a bit of a slump. While the Utah fest boasts an impressive and impassioned slate of documentaries this year – I haven’t seen a dud yet, and I’ve seen many – the narrative offerings have mostly fizzled on impact. Plenty of beautiful shots and atmospheric vibes, aimless plot and unearned yearning.

Which made the premiere of Sorry, Baby, comedian Eva Victor’s feature debut as a writer-director, an especially brisk breath of fresh air on Monday night. Sharply written, smartly structured and well-acted, with a star-making turn from Victor herself, the 93-minute black comedy is not only nimble and consistently funny, but one of the best, most honest renderings of life after sexual assault that I’ve seen.

Sorry, Baby is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution