2020 Sundance Film Festival

A single Greyhound bus is the connecting link of The Glorias, the new movie by Julie Taymor (Titus, Across the Universe, Frida), about feminist, activist, icon Gloria Steinem. Based on Steinem’s 2015 memoir My Life on the Road, the film shows her portrayed by four different actresses at four different stages of her life.

Carey Mulligan is Cassie, the protagonist in Promising Young Woman which some at Sundance have called a brilliant #metoo-inspired answer to the spate of films centering on toxic male rage. In the film directed by Emerald Fennel, the Killing Eve showrunner, Cassie turns the tables on the men who normalize predatory behavior.

The crowd that packed the Sundance screening of Summertime at the MARC Theater in Park City was one of the most stoked in memory. Mostly because at least half the audience seemed to be made up by either cast, crew or friends of Carlos Lopez Estrada’s exuberant and experiential poetry-driven film.

Its provocative, politically incorrect title serving as advance notice of the myth-smashing yet to unfold, Crip Camp, which just enjoyed its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, tells an emotionally affecting civil rights story that illustrates how barriers — despite the pat presentations history books generally give us — are broken through less with single moments of radical, raised-fist norm-toppling, and more often eroded, overcome and defended over and over again with the hard work and dogged determination of marginalized sub-groups, which then manifests in social awakening and broader societal buy-in. Executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama as the first effort out of the gate in their slate of programming for Netflix, this documentary takes as its titular focus Camp Jened, a teenage summer retreat first founded in the 1950s and eventually taken over in the 1970s by hippies with no formal training in special-needs care, but who provided an environment in which the disabled were empowered and given a platform to discuss their feelings and dream about a more equitable future.

Standing ovations of the magnitude of the one that shook the cavernous Eccles Theater for the premiere of Miss Americana are rare at the Sundance Festival. Then again, you already knew the screening of the much-awaited Taylor Swift documentary was going to be a special event from the spontaneous choirs of Swift lyrics which had been erupting from the ticket line.

It’s that time of the year again: Hollywood and the international film industry are descending on Park City to kick off the year in movies. The weather forecast is freezing: when the high is 30F, you just know you better pack those earmuffs for a night out on Main Street.