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

A conflicted mood has lingered over Utah’s long-running film festival with premieres and parties continuing but stars speaking out against government cruelty

The news began to spread through the Sundance film festival on Saturday morning, as people emerged from early screenings or long nights out at the bars on Main Street.

“If you all have not heard what’s going on in Minnesota this morning, someone else was murdered by ICE,” director Ava DuVernay told the audience at a panel on freedom of expression, referring to the shooting that morning of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, by federal agents in Minneapolis.

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

Elijah Wood joined protest in Utah’s Park City in memory of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, while Natalie Portman said what is happening is ‘absolutely horrific’

The Sundance film festival, which is currently under way in Park City, Utah, saw a mass protest against the two fatal shootings in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Sunday, along with high-profile interventions from major film industry figures.

Actor Natasha Lyonne was among those spreading social media posts about the protest, called “Sundancers Melt ICE”, which was called for Sunday afternoon. The organisers asked for a 10-minute “respectful” event at sunset on Park City’s Main Street to memorialise Renee Good, who was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent on 7 January, and Alex Pretti, who was killed on Saturday by an agent of the Department of Homeland Security.

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: a new documentary explores the author’s physical and spiritual healing from the 2022 knife attack that almost killed him

On 12 August 2022, as Salman Rushdie was about to launch into a lecture on the importance of protecting writers from harm at New York’s Chautauqua Institution, a man in a black mask rushed the stage with a knife. To the horror of the packed amphitheater, the man stabbed the Indian-born British-American author – once the subject of an infamous fatwa from the leader of Iran in the 1980s – 15 times in the face, neck and torso, before members of the audience rushed the stage and disarmed him. Rushdie survived, narrowly; the stabbing left him on a ventilator, severed tendons in his left hand, and cost him his right eye.

A full recreation of that attack from Rushdie’s perspective — 27 seconds of struggle, the mysterious man’s face, several sickening punches of blade — opens a new documentary on Rushdie’s recovery and resilience, which drew a standing ovation at the Sundance film festival. Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, directed by Alex Gibney and based on Rushdie’s memoir of the same name, is unsparing on the devastating results of the stabbing: in never-before-seen footage recorded by the author’s wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Rushdie appears gruesomely disfigured — his skin discolored, his entire abdomen bisected by stitches, his swollen neck held together by stitches, his eye indescribably mangled. His first coherent thought after regaining consciousness, he recalls in the film, was simply: “We need to document this.”

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

Sundance film festival: an underground scene of creatives in Tehran is threatened in this lived-in hangout movie that bravely chooses optimism over negativity

It’s a summer evening in Tehran, and the streets of the Iranian capital are lively. A young creative couple, an actor and a dancer, coolly take in a performance from a band of street musicians. “This country is so full of artists,” the man, Ali (Farzad Karen), says to Hanna (Hana Mana). She replies warily: “Let’s see if they stay like this.”

The remark is delivered casually in Maryam Ataei and Hossein Keshavarz’s stirring new film The Friend’s House Is Here, sprinkled in between airy banter and snippets of various rehearsals, but it’s no trivial matter. Under Iran’s theocratic regime, creative expression is a risky and unstable endeavor. The government tightly polices the contents of all art – visual works, theater, music, film, literature – for strict adherence to state ideology. Failure to receive a permit could result in fines, imprisonment or banishment. The colorful characters amiably populating this loose, organic film, played by a collective of real-life underground artists and improv actors, are liable to be harassed, fined, arrested or disappeared at any moment.