Category: Now Playing

If you can use some levity in your Halloween movie nights this year, check out three picks from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival that infuse a bit of comedy into the traditional horror genre. In Justin Simien’s satirical, ’80s-set Bad Hair, a weave takes on a mind of its own as an ambitious young woman tries everything to succeed in the image-obsessed world of music television.
For more laughs than scares, watch Josh Ruben’s cabin-fire storytelling romp Scare Me, or catch Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s Save Yourselves!, an apocalyptic satire in which a decidedly nonsurvivalist millennial couple face an invasion from an otherworldly force.

September’s slate of Sundance Institute–supported releases features a strong lineup of documentaries that run the gamut from the heartwarming to the harrowing. On the human connection side of the spectrum, Maite Alberdi’s The Mole Agent follows 83-year-old Sergio, who goes undercover to investigate a nursing home but bungles the spy-gear technology and can’t seem to stay on course with the mission. An all-in-one uplifting, cutely funny but meaningful tearjerker, it’s the film we all need in 2020.

The Sundance Film Festival has long been a destination for inspiring documentaries that capture the indomitable spirit of those on the frontlines of world-changing movements—from Mark Kitchell’s 1991 student activism doc Berkeley in the Sixties, to 2012’s wealth inequality exposé We’re Not Broke, to 2017’s Whose Streets?, in which a Ferguson protester implores, “We have to raise a generation of activists. If there’s going to be any change, it starts with our children.” These words are proving true today as young people now lead the swelling antiracism movement across the country and the world.

Eugene Kotlyarenko’s thriller Spree is now streaming after its premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Equal parts horror and satire, the film plays out almost entirely through the device screens of its main character and villain, rideshare driver and wannabe influencer Kurt (Joe Keery). Desperate for the validation of strangers, Kurt turns his unsuccessful social media account into a livestream of deadly attacks on his passengers, which only gets more twisted as he amasses more followers.

At the top of the list of Sundance Institute–supported films coming to streaming platforms this month is Alison Ellwood’s doc The Go-Go’s, the heart-and-drama-fueled saga of the eponymous 1980s punk-turned-pop band who paved the way for women in the music industry. Though the film does delve into the more salacious parts of the group’s history, it also shows the human side of the band caught between conflicting images as both “America’s sweethearts” and “drug-crazed demons.”
For an inspiring documentary about the dogged Filipina reporter leading the charge for a free press despite pervasive threats from the authoritarian government, watch Ramona S.

Natalie Erika James’s debut feature, Relic, had its premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival as part of the Midnight lineup. It is now available to rent online (and is screening at select drive-ins around the United States).
As Natalie Erika James recounted during the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, the seed for the horror story that would become Relic was planted when she went to Japan as an adult to spend time with her grandmother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s.

After premiering at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, Mucho Mucho Amor is now streaming on Netflix. The film explores the life and mystery surrounding the late Walter Mercado, a larger-than-life TV astrologer turned cultural icon who captivated Latinx audiences for decades with his over-the-top flair before disappearing from public life at the peak of his fame.
Directors Cristina Costantini and Kareem Tabsch, like so many other Latinx folks who grew up with the famed personality on their TVs, remember being mesmerized alongside their mothers and grandmothers—knowing they couldn’t dare interrupt—as they waited for Walter to get to their sign.

After Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra’s genre-defying documentary about a for-profit immigrant detention center screened at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, the high of a successful premiere and winning multiple awards turned into shock and anger when one of the film’s subjects, Claudio Rojas, was detained by ICE and torn apart from his wife and children.

The Infiltrators documented a previous time Claudio was detained, in 2012—and how a group of young immigrant activists hatched a plan to purposely get caught by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, infiltrate the Florida detention center where Claudio was being held, and help him and others fight their deportations. Ibarra and Rivera won accolades for the way they challenge the documentary form, deftly weaving together footage of the activists’ work and reenactments of the detainees in a way that keeps you in the middle of the action.

The slate of Sundance Institute–supported films available in July includes powerful political documentaries that shine a spotlight on critical issues. The Fight follows heroic ACLU lawyers in four historic cases over essential rights in abortion, immigration, LGBTQ+ issues, and voting, while the award-winning Boys State looks at the state of American politics through the unlikely lens of an annual mock election among the best and brightest of Texas’s young men. And She Could Be Next documents the women of color who claimed their power by running for office during the historic 2018 midterm elections—including women like Rashida Tlaib and Stacey Abrams who are transforming politics from the ground up.

‘And Then We Danced’ is now streaming on Prime Video, Google Play, YouTube, and beyond. As Pride Month comes to a close, we’re offering up our exclusive video interview with the film’s director, Levan Akin.
When Levan Akin’s coming-of-age feature And Then We Danced had its world premiere at Cannes last spring, the film received a 15-minute standing ovation.

When Thousand Pieces of Gold hit theaters in 1991, critics were quick to compare first-time feature director Nancy Kelly to filmmakers like John Ford, Budd Boetticher, and George Stevens, masters of the classic Western—and that was something Kelly and her filmmaking partner (and husband), Kenji Yamamoto, weren’t sure how to take at the time.
“We just don’t like Westerns that much,” Yamamoto told me over the phone when I caught up with the pair to find out more about the making of the project, which went through the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab in 1989, premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1991, and was recently given a 4K restoration by IndieCollect that is being released by Kino Lorber.
Not that they wrote the genre off altogether: “My favorites feature powerful leading women: Destry Rides Again, Johnny Guitar, The Big Country, The Outlaw,” Kelly wrote in a recent piece for IndieWire.

With so many playwrights and directors seeing their productions closed early, postponed, or, worst of all, canceled due to the impacts of COVID-19, new creative solutions are allowing creators to continue sharing their stories. Some theatres have taken to digital programming or adapting their commissions to be “listen-only,” and some artists are now sharing stories with audiences independently via social media. Play At Home, a new initiative launched by a group of regional and off-Broadway theatres, is offering its own solution for playwrights and audiences alike: it’s commissioning playwrights to write 10-minute plays that you can perform at home with your family members or roommates, or even by yourself.