Reviews

Nanfu Wang’s gripping new documentary In the Same Breath, which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, opens on the 2019 New Year’s Eve in Wuhan, China, site of the first cases of the novel coronavirus. It may be an interesting (and fateful) coincidence that the filmmaker was a Sundance Film Festival juror in Park City on January 23, 2020, the same day Wuhan went into lockdown during the first COVID-19 outbreak.

Lucy Walker’s Bring Your Own Brigade isn't the first documentary about the devastation wrought by uncontrolled wildfires that destroyed Paradise, California. In 2020, director Ron Howard’s Rebuilding Paradise also played at the Sundance Film Festival.

With the mainstreaming of nonfiction narratives and the expansion in streaming platform options, the last two decades or so have seen an explosion in documentaries chronicling precocious overachievers, from Jeffrey Blitz’s Oscar-nominated Spellbound all the way up to and including several new offerings at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Cusp, on the other hand, co-directed by Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt, is an arresting work of underclass portraiture that exists on the opposite end of this adolescent spectrum, centering not on honor roll students but rather on kids with a certain amount of trauma and an even greater amount of uncertainty about what their futures could or should hold.

A world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was the recipient of the U. S.

Offering rich historical material, All Light, Everywhere, Theo Anthony's chilling documentary deals with the increasing presence of sophisticated and subtle surveillance in our everyday lives. World premiering at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, it was honored with a special jury prize in nonfiction experimentation.

Winner of the 2021 Sundance Documentary competition, Summer of Soul, can perhaps best be described as an engrossing history lesson with an irresistible beat. The documentary marks the directing debut of Ahmir Questlove Thompson and it takes us back to the torrid summer of 1969, when a public concert series, collectively dubbed the Harlem Cultural Festival, took place in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park.

The scholastic pressures facing academically motivated, high-achieving teenagers are as great as they’ve ever been, a fact engagingly chronicled by director Debbie Lum in Try Harder!, a recent world premiere and U. S.

The closing credits, featuring some of the names of the filmmakers juxtaposed on a cave wall, beneath the sound of a crackling fire, speak in a powerfully direct and simple way to the need for storytelling, which is long hardwired into mankind. So, is this director Rodney Ascher’s sly way of acknowledging that his latest film, A Glitch in the Matrix, is itself an exercise in flamboyant narrative indulgence, despite its nonfiction roots? If so, it’s perhaps too cute by half, but also emblematic of the fitful engagement of this intellectually playful yet ultimately frustrating documentary, which unfolds as a mixture of epistemological surveying and philosophical spitballing.

In 1969, famed Italian director Luchino Visconti went on a search to cast the critical part of Tadzio for his then upcoming film Death in Venice. When he discovered a 15-year-old Björn Andrésen in Sweden, he proclaimed that he had found ‘the most beautiful boy in the world’.

Every year, the Sundance Film Festival has one big controversial documentary on their schedule. Just remember Alex Gibney’s anti-Scientology film Going Clear, and last year’s Leaving Neverland, a multiple-part HBO doc about Michael Jackson’s pedophilia.