Sundance film festival: Jay Duplass recruits David Duchovny, Hope Davis and Kaitlyn Dever for a patchy, poignant tale

If anyone can speak to the “end of an era” nostalgia coursing through the legacy-minded 2026 Sundance film festival, its final edition in Park City and its first without founder Robert Redford, it would be Jay Duplass. The film-maker first attended the indie festival along with his brother, Mark, in 2003, with a self-proclaimed “$3 film”, then went on to premiere three projects – The Puffy Chair, Baghead and Cyrus – that epitomized the much-debated, very indie mumblecore movement of yore. For the Duplass brothers, the festival was, as it has been for many a small-budget artist trying to break out, the difference between a career and another $3 film. Without Sundance, he recently joked: “I’d probably be a psychologist right now.”

Psychologist sympathies peek through See You When I See You, Duplass’s feature film return to the festival after 16 years largely focused on acting and directing episodic television, notably for Togetherness, Search Party and the criminally underseen Somebody, Somewhere. An earnest adaptation of comedian Adam Cayton-Holland’s memoir, Tragedy Plus Time, the 102-minute film is both a straightforward tribute to psychotherapy and a tightrope walk of tone, attempting to balance profound grief with breezy comedy for a family reeling from a shocking loss.

See You When I See You is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

L'Académie des César a dévoilé aujourd'hui les nommés de sa prochaine édition. Quels films partent favoris ? Qui succèdera au succès d'Emilia Perez aux César 2025 qui avait obtenu 7 récompenses ? Pour mémoire, l'année dernière, Le Comte de Monte Cristo était parti en tête des nominations aux Cé…

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Contenu partenaire

La 36e édition du Festival Ciné Junior, le festival international de cinéma jeunes publics en France, attend les cinéphiles petits et grands du 4 au 15 février 2026 dans 29 villes du Val-de-Marne et 16 villes d’île-de-France. Pendant plus d'une semaine, les enfants – dè…

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La grand-messe du cinéma français n’aura finalement pas lieu le vendredi 27 février 2026 comme il était initialement prévu, mais un jour avant, le jeudi 26 février. C’est ce que l’Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma et CANAL+, diffuseur officiel de la cérémonie, viennent d’an…

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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

C'est un rôle toujours très observé... Celui de maitre de cérémonie des César ! Benjamin Lavernhe a accepté cette mission pour la 51e édition qui aura lieu le vendredi 27 février prochain.

Alors que les nominations seront dévoilées ce mercredi matin à 10h, nous vous proposons de découvrir un…

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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

Qui succèdera à Conclave ? Les nominations de la 79e édition des BAFTA, l'équivalent des César en France et des Oscars aux Etats-Unis, viennent d'être annoncées par la comédienne Aimee Lou Wood et l'acteur David Jonsson, lauréat du BAFTA du Meilleur espoir l'an dernier.

Contrairement aux Oscars, l…

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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.

Une nouvelle édition sous le signe de l’authenticité

Fort du succès de sa dernière édition, qui était parvenue à rassembler plus de 40 000 passionnés, le festival des saisons Hanabi proposera, cette année encore, aux cinéphiles de voyager au cœur de la civilisation japonaise depuis le confo…

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Une 29e édition sous le signe des stars et des premières fois

Après six jours de compétition, la 29e édition du festival du film de comédie de l'Alpe d'Huez, lancée le 19 janvier dernier, touche à sa fin. L'événement permis à des milliers de festivaliers de découvrir, en avant-première, les…

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Il nous a fait pleurer avec Fruitvale Station en 2013, puis vibrer avec Creed et Black Panther. Aujourd’hui, avec 16 nominations aux Oscars pour Sinners, Ryan Coogler entre dans l’Histoire.

Avec ce film d’horreur se déroulant dans le Mississippi au début des années 30, le metteur en s…

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