Reviews

In the early 1990s, children’s cable network Nickelodeon, seeking animated programming different from the medium’s traditional powerhouse providers, opened itself up to outside pitches and turned to a hyperactive, highly imaginative upstart, John Kricfalusi, giving him a shot with a six-episode order for Ren & Stimpy, a TV show about an emotionally imbalanced chihuahua and his good-natured but dimwitted feline best friend. When the series premiered in August 1991, it was an out-of-the-gate smash hit, breaking rating records, immediately challenging The Simpsons (then just entering its third season) for domination among animation fans, and eventually raking in, at its peak, several billion dollars in merchandising per year.

Since the onset of the Arab Spring, the Sundance Film Festival has been a platform for in-depth documentaries. From Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and the Yemen, audiences have been taken behind the news headlines and introduced to the people who risk their lives facing brutal regimes for freedom and democracy.

In recent years, Sundance has drawn quite a few politicians and activists to the snow-capped mountains of Park City, most notably Al Gore and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the former a two-time producer of environmental documentaries, the latter the subject of a doc on her life. This year it was none lesser than the former First Lady, New York Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who flew in from New York (on a commercial flight, not private), to promote Hillary, a four-part, four-hour documentary that will start airing on Hulu in March.

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.

An intimately scaled, uniquely heartrending nonfiction film that serves as an emotionally fortifying takedown of the dehumanizing demagoguery dominating much of the discourse of the modern-day American political landscape, Midnight Traveler is a powerful snapshot of refugee reality, capturing the first-person dangers and universal love of a family on the run. Shot entirely on three cell phones and telling the story of a journey spanning over 3,500 miles and three-plus years, Afghan director Hassan Fazili’s movie, which just enjoyed its world premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, is a handcrafted, openhearted vaccination against ignorance and hate.

Best known as the author of the Millennium trilogy, a brooding and gritty series of crime novels which introduced readers to the complex character of Lisbeth Salander and collectively sold more than 80 million copies worldwide, late Swedish writer Stieg Larsson was actually also an investigative journalist. He dedicated his life to studying and exposing the dark world of xenophobia and anti-democratic political movements – an endeavor that obviously has increased relevance today.

Part mystery and part history lesson, director Jacqueline Olive’s Always in Season is an ambitious and extraordinarily timely documentary about race relations, equality under the law, and the lingering aftereffects of a dark and violent past that still lurk, like a latent infection, in too many parts of the United States. Narrated by Danny Glover, and melding the story of the suspicious 2014 death of an African American teenager found hanging from a swing set with a broader exploration of the country’s history of lynching, the film is a pained howl for justice and reconciliation in a divided America.

Documentaries are no longer feature films’ poor little relation and it's in no small way thanks to the Sundance Festival that has attracted, promoted and nursed many of them to successful runs, first in theaters,  and later on cable and streaming channels. It was at Park City that Alex Gibney premiered one of the hottest docs four years ago, Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief, and two years later Vice President Al Gore brought the sequel to his climate change film An Inconvenient Truth which itself caused a stir in 2006.