Sundance film festival: a once-in-a-lifetime dinner party from 1972 is transformed into a thrilling and inspiring hang-out movie

In August 1972, the experimental film-maker William Greaves convened a once-in-a-lifetime dinner party at Duke Ellington’s townhouse in Harlem. The occasion was a celebration and reconsideration of the Harlem Renaissance, the watershed African American cultural movement of the 1920s. The guest list included its still-living luminaries, some of the 20th century’s most influential – and still underappreciated – musicians, performers, artists, writers, historians and political leaders, all in their sunset years. Over four hours and untold glasses of wine, talk wheeled freely from vivid recollections to consternation, lively anecdotes to contemplations of ongoing struggle. Greaves, by then niche renowned for his innovatively meta documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, lightly directed the conversation but otherwise let the energy flow. He considered it the most important footage he ever recorded.

You could probably release that remarkable footage in full, completely unedited and unstructured, and still have a good documentary; every piece is now, 50 years later – the same distance to us as the Harlem Renaissance was to them – a bridge to a time no living person can remember, each face and gesture informed by decades of aftermath no straightforward nonfiction film on the period could capture. But Once Upon a Time in Harlem, directed by Greaves’s son David, who was one of four cameramen that day, manages to seamlessly clip and contextualize the party into 100 mesmerizing minutes. It’s both a sublime hang-out of a film and a celebration of individual achievements, a fascinating map of a long-ago scene and a referendum on legacy.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

Rotterdam film festival
A set of shorts by film-makers from Afghanistan, Iran, Ukraine, Syria and Somalia are shocking, funny and mysterious in equal measure

With considerable chutzpah and elan, and in her capacity as producer and UNHCR Goodwill ambassador, Cate Blanchett has achieved a geopolitical film-making coup. In concert with festival authorities in Rotterdam, she has secured cash and commissioned short films on the subject of displacement from five directors – including Mohammad Rasoulof, now in exile from his native Iran due to his pro-democracy activism, in effect making his first public statement since the recent massacres and apparently expressing his fears that he may never go home again.

The films are far from solemnly earnest – this is an anthology of five brilliant miniature artworks. By turns shocking, funny, confessional and deeply mysterious, this is a tremendous collection; the constituent films of which benefit in some enigmatic way from being shown together. What Ealing Studios’s Dead of Night did for scariness, these films may have done for 21st-century exile.

Sundance film festival: the story of the Marion County Record and the forces that tried to destroy it is expanded for a charming, and concerning, look at freedom of the press

On 11 August 2023, police officers executed a search warrant on the offices of the Marion County Record, a small, family-owned paper in central Kansas. Local law enforcement seized the computers, cell phones and reporting materials from all staff, as well as from the homes of one city council member and paper co-owner Eric Meyer, without incident – though they met the impassioned resistance of Meyer’s 98-year-old mother Joan, the paper’s other co-owner, who threw her walker to the ground and declared the raid “Nazi stuff”.

“This is illegal,” Eric Meyers warns the officers, as seen in a new documentary on the episode. “You’re going to be on national news tonight.”

Au lendemain de l'annonce des nominations des César 2026 et à un peu moins d'un mois de la cérémonie (qui a été avancée de 24h, le jeudi 26 février précisément), la promo décalée commence autour de son maitre de cérémonie, Benjamin Lavernhe.

Avec le réalisateur Hugo Gélin (French Lover, Mon…

Article original publié sur AlloCiné

Sundance film festival: there are some effective early moments in this ultra low-budget, audio-first horror but deja vu soon replaces intrigue

There’s a swirl of creepy noises in A24’s new hyped-up horror Undertone – screaming, gargling, singing, banging – but nothing is quite loud enough to drown out the swirl of films it’s cribbing from. The debut feature from writer-director Ian Tuason, about horror podcasters who receive a set of mysterious recordings, has elements of Paranormal Activity, Session 9, Hereditary, The Ring, The Blair Witch Project and The Exorcist, enough sighs of familiarity to give horror fans a scary case of deja vu. It’s not that total originality is expected at this particular moment (this weekend’s Send Help has been touted as Misery meets Castaway), but given the genre’s overcrowd, it’s hard to see what pushes Undertone above the noise.

What it does do is make for an impressively resourceful use of a low budget, the whole thing costing about $500,000. It’s all shot in one house (Tuason’s actual home) and for the most part, any sinister goings on are restricted to audio footage, heard through the headphones of our lead Eva (Nina Kiri, who reminds me of a young Alice Eve). She’s living back home with her terminally ill mother, fending calls from a thoughtless boyfriend and patiently awaiting those from her friend, and maybe one that got away, Justin (the voice of White Lotus breakout Adam DiMarco, replacing the original voice after the A24 acquisition). The pair co-host a podcast that analyses creepy tales, Eva as the skeptic and Justin as the believer, the pair’s flirtatious pitter-patter positioning them as the Mulder and Scully of the audio world.

Au lendemain de l'annonce des nominations des César 2026 et à un peu moins d'un mois de la cérémonie (qui a été avancée de 24h, le jeudi 26 février précisément), la promo décalée commence autour de son maitre de cérémonie, Benjamin Lavernhe.

Avec le réalisateur Hugo Gélin (French Lover, Mon…

Article original publié sur AlloCiné

Sundance film festival: comedian Iliza Shlesinger’s nonsensical misfire is a swirl of cliches, unfunny comedy, stock characters and bizarre direction from Josephine Decker

I will give Chasing Summer this: there’s something inherently interesting about its unexpected union of two opposite forces. On one side there’s Josephine Decker, an unusual film-maker whose genre-challenging work spans experimental theater (2019’s Madeline’s Madeline), claustrophobic psychodrama (2020’s perversely thrilling, woefully underseen Shirley) and magical realism (the 2022 YA grief flick The Sky Is Everywhere). On the other, comedian Iliza Shlesinger, whose brand of fast-paced, ribald, sometimes hilarious (and sometimes too gender-essentialist) standup is both subverted and enhanced by her own white, blond conventional attractiveness. I can’t imagine many saw the former choosing to direct Chasing Summer, a Hallmark-esque comedy written by and starring the latter. Theoretically, the collision should generate sparks.

It does, though I can’t imagine in the way the odd couple intended. The 98-minute film, which premiered this week at Sundance, is one of the most bizarre combinations of director and material I’ve ever seen, more curious car crash than collaboration. It is almost worth it to watch a sensitive and surprising director, so attuned to inner turmoil and unreality, wrangle anything substantial out of razor-thin characters and a boilerplate set-up.

Chasing Summer is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution