Alejandro Landes’s Monos is sometimes a thrilling action film, bounding from cloud islands in the Colombian highlands down into dense jungle canyons. But more frequently it’s a nuanced and beautifully photographed psychodrama exploring the tensions holding together a squad of child soldiers deeply immersed in an unending civil war—so deeply they seem to know nothing of the conflict other than its basest imperatives and hierarchies. In other words, war is their youth and life. They call themselves monos, monkeys, taking codenames, or simply nicknames, for themselves, as if they were superheroes or mythological beings: Bigfoot, Wolf, Lady, Dog, Boom Boom, etc.

The film opens with the monos ensconced at a remote mountain base, a kind of brutalist treehouse idyll, where they enjoy a relatively free, heavily armed state of adolescence, taking pleasure in their natural environment and violent play, as well as in their developing, gender-fluid sexuality. The band’s only duties, for the moment, are to stay vigilant and to guard an American engineer, known to them as Doctora (Julianne Nicholson), taken hostage by the rebel Organization for whom the monos fight. In this high state of grace, Doctora, the only adult around, often seems more of a playmate for the monos than their a prisoner.

Soon, The Messenger arrives, the team’s handler and drill sergeant, a cruel-faced representative of distant authorities with obscure plans, bringing with him another assignment: maintaining a milk cow on loan to the Organization from peasant supporters of the revolution. This added responsibility, however, quickly begins to expose potential fractures within the group and the ease with which their unity, their “we”—temporarily fixed by The Messenger’s discipline, a goad to their pride—can turn to an indolent disorder and a Lord of the Flies-like atavism focused on “him,” “them,” and “you.” They are teenagers after all, and even play wrestling is practice, yes? A martial skill that must eventually be turned on something, or someone. One wonders, actually, how the adults who made killers of these kids—perhaps assuming their malleability and lack of conscience—could allow themselves to think them incapable of aiming their lethal potential at authority in general, at everything that wants to control and isn’t them.

Monos’ power derives from its preferencing of myth over reality. For all its intimacy with the characters’ faces and bodies, with their human qualities—strength, weakness, ingenuity, fear—its mode is not to sentimentalize the monos’ lost innocence, but to mythify their creation, their mode of living, and the legacy they make for themselves (that they’ve been made to make by the Organization and by a country in perpetual crisis), not just in the jungle but in any other world they choose to enter. There is a reality from which they’ve escaped, and it is no match for their capacity to play one game.

Landes, his actors, his cinematographer and editor lyricize these lives and the landscape with an exquisite sense of taste and timing, without trivializing at all the issues at stake for the real Colombia, and for its Central American neighbors—Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador—whose citizens are fleeing north from the same kind of violent actors, seeking sanctuary and hope. If we’re familiar with the contours of this story, the unbounded child mob’s descent into pitiless savagery, Monos provides us with a particularly irresistible version of it—sensual and surreal with no easy answers.

See all of our Sundance coverage here.

In the cutthroat world of fine-art trading and representation, up-and-coming agent Josephina (Zawe Ashton) stumbles across a secret weapon: hundreds of dazzling paintings left behind after an elderly tenant in her building dies. Ignoring the instructions the clandestine artist left to destroy his work, she promptly starts circulating the paintings, which soon attract the attention of the heavy hitters around her—including her boss Rhodora (Rene Russo), art critic (and Josephina’s sometime lover) Morf (Jake Gyllenhaal), and competing collectors, managers, and curators like Bryson (Billy Magnussen) and Gretchen (Toni Collette). Yet as the deceased artist’s portraits gain posthumous acclaim, they also awaken something imperceptible and sinister that threatens to punish those who have profited from his work.

Master of suspense Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler) has assembled an all-star cast for this dark, uproarious, and painfully accurate spoof of the art world. With strong supporting turns by John Malkovich, Daveed Diggs, and Natalia Dyer, Velvet Buzzsaw invites us into a traditionally insular world that’s suddenly splattered wide open, where art and commerce collide with dire consequences.

See all our Sundance coverage here.

Photos by Natalie Simpson / Beehive Photography 

Back in the 1960s, June Leigh wrote one blockbuster of a book, The Patriarch, and it changed her life. A thick indictment of Vietnam profiteering in the form of a single man, June’s book seemed perfect for the times, awash in progressive politics that would get people thinking about and maybe working for a better future, maybe get them marching in the streets. But what the critics wanted to focus on, really, was the resemblance of June’s protagonist to her father. The fallout from that question is what lands her in a very different position, a very different world than she’d inhabited and imagined: a crumby, overstuffed apartment in the burning 1977 Bronx.

The apartment was once a haven when it belonged to her grandmother, but now June (an agonizingly frayed Naomi Watts) lives there like a refugee, a “crib job,” watching the world come apart from her window, deeply invested in some dark magical thinking that keeps her from putting one foot over the threshold. And now, even if the world seems to have moved on from the literary wunderkind, someone’s apparently still interested enough to buzz her intercom night and day, trying, she thinks, to drive her insane. At this precise moment, New York is insane, awash in violence and the arsons that would eventually reshape The Bronx. And it’s the Summer of Sam, too, the mass murderer a writer himself, wishing everyone a hearty hello from the gutters of New York as he kills women who look just like June. Is she paranoid? Is she even relevant enough to be paranoid?

The Wolf Hour is a finely crafted, nervy study of a woman’s struggle to emerge from a complex self-exile. There’s something of Rear Window in the claustrophobic closure of the set, but here Raymond Burr is the world, and there’s little pleasure or even distracting heartbreak to be observed in the windows across the way—just more reminders of the internal as much as external hell to which June has confined herself. And reminders, too, of the struggles and desperation of people who don’t look like her, though it takes June awhile, and a few encounters with her delivery boy, Freddie, to understand this. While there’s much more to June’s background, relationships, and high flying career than we’re allowed to know up front, director Alistair Banks Griffin makes the important choice not to fill us in via flashback, not to let us out of the apartment even in memory, instead loading June’s entire history onto the slim, present body of Watts (ably assisted by the fine score), sometimes cringing, sometimes proud, even ecstatic as fragments of culture provoke and prod her. Given the contrast of June’s personal history with the neighborhood, I’m not sure the film explores or interrogates her privileged, aristocratic origins as much as it might. Other white characters stoke her seemingly inherent fears by advising her to watch herself or, better yet, get away from these “animals,” the sharp-voiced, dark-skinned, often violent men in the street. And perhaps a more direct examination of this particular fear wouldn’t have felt true to the time, but we can certainly see June’s only tentative steps toward re-seeing non-whites as something of a persistent failure of her vague progressive ideals, no matter what progress she manages to make personally.

Is there any true escape from the apartment, then, from the crumbling fortress of self its become? Tune in to The Wolf Hour and see for yourself. It is an excellent watch.

See all our Sundance coverage here.

The red, err, blue carpet for Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile a dramatisation of the life of serial killer Ted Bundy was held before the premiere on Sunday, Jan. 28. The story starts in the year 1969. Ted (Zac Efron) is handsome, smart, charismatic, affectionate. And cautious single mother Liz Kloepfer (Lily Collins) ultimately cannot resist his charms. For her, Ted is a match made in heaven, and she soon falls head over heels in love with the dashing young man. A picture of domestic bliss, the happy couple seems to have it all figured out … until, out of nowhere, their perfect life is shattered. Ted is arrested and charged with a series of increasingly grisly murders. Concern soon turns to paranoia—and, as evidence piles up, Liz is forced to consider that the man with whom she shares her life could actually be a psychopath.

This is the story of Ted Bundy, one of the most notorious serial killers of all time. Collins shines as Liz, while Zac Efron gives a performance that could redefine his career. Renowned filmmaker Joe Berlinger, best known for his true-crime documentaries brings this Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile story to the screen.

See all our Sundance coverage here.

Photos by Natalie Simpson / Beehive Photography 

It’s July 1977, and New York City is awash with escalating violence. A citywide blackout is triggering fires, looting, and countless arrests, and the Son of Sam murders are riddling the city with panic. June, once a celebrated counterculture figure, attempts to retreat from the chaos by shutting herself inside the yellowed walls of her grandmother’s South Bronx apartment. But her doorbell is ringing incessantly, the heat is unbearable, and creeping paranoia and fear are taking hold. Visitors, some invited, some unsolicited, arrive one by one, and June must determine whom she can trust and whether she can find a path back to her former self.

With Hitchcockian tautness, writer-director Alistair Banks Griffin flawlessly captures the style and texture of the 1970s and the interior unraveling of a woman who, like her city, is teetering on a knife-edge. Naomi Watts’s astonishing performance is that of an antihero racked with paralyzing anxiety. In this eerily resonant allegory for our times, she is, like all of us, weighing her actions in a world on the brink of collapse.

Photos by Natalie Simpson / Beehive Photography

Senate staffer Daniel Jones is assigned the daunting task of leading an investigation into the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. After analyzing extensive evidence, he learns about the “enhanced interrogation techniques”—proven to be brutal, immoral, and ineffective—that the CIA adopted after 9/11. When Jones and the Senate Intelligence Committee attempt to release the results from his investigation, however, the CIA and White House go to great lengths to prevent the truth from getting out.

Highly acclaimed producer and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns returns to the director’s chair to helm this absorbing political thriller. Weaving together more than a decade’s worth of real-life political intrigue, Burns’s script offers a clear-eyed account of Jones’s tireless fight to research and publish his damning 525-page public report. The Report also features a dream cast, including Adam Driver (as the driven Daniel Jones) and the always-great Annette Bening (as Senator Dianne Feinstein), that memorably brings this riveting story to life.

Photos by Natalie Simpson / Beehive Photography

On Sunday of opening weekend of Sundance 2019, The producers behind A Tuba to Cuba, a documentary film on the history of New Orleans jazz, set up a Second Line brass band parade down Main Street during the Sundance Film Festival. The parade was be lead by Win and Regine of Arcade Fire accompanied by the famed Preservation Hall Jazz Band  from New Orleans. Although Second Lines are generally present trailing a funeral procession and it’s not really clear who died, it was pretty fun. And weird, cuz snow.

See all of our Sundance coverage here.

Photos by Natalie Simpson / Beehive Photography.

Extinction event isn’t really a term you ever want to hear, particularly if you’re a human living somewhere on the outside of the Repopulation Center in Grant Sputore’s sci-fi family drama, I Am Mother. On the other hand, once the mysterious cataclysm thundering through the opening scene is over, inside the Center, at least one lucky embryo (of 63,000 in cold storage), soon to be known as Daughter, will be fortunate enough to be chosen by the digital stork and to grow up with all she needs in the loving arms of…a robot. Named Mother. Who is tenderly voiced by Rose Byrne.

In the early years, Daughter mostly doesn’t seem to mind being an only child, particularly with such a giving guardian. Sure, she wonders, as we do, why, with all those thousands of other options on hand, she can’t have even one brother or sister. But Mother soothes her, blaming herself for her own inexperience raising kids. When Mother’s proved (to who?) that she can be a good parent, they’ll be ready to hatch a few siblings. In glass wombs! In just 24 hours!

But then, before you know it, Daughter’s a teen, and she’s getting bored being in the house all the time, watching reruns of The Tonight Show. (Don’t we wonder what she’s learning about human behavior from this? Does she get irony? Does she imagine herself with Johnny’s white hair, think about aging, death? Wouldn’t she have a few questions about Johnny and Ed’s off-color banter that might break up those boring medical ethics lessons Mother insists on? I mean, it’s not like there are any other humans around to care about anyway, right? As if!)

But wait! Is that someone knocking on the air lock? OMG…it’s Hilary Swank! Gutshot and needing surgery, so all that medical training had a purpose after all!

But didn’t Mother say all the real humans were wiped out by a virus or something? And that they were bad because they screwed up the world? Could she have lied, like Hilary says? I mean, she seems cool. Or is Hilary Swank the liar? Can’t somebody just tell the truth for once? I’m so confused!

No. Wait. Sorry. It’s Daughter that’s confused. We, on the other hand, are simply hooked by this film’s fascinating turn on familial love and growing up. Of course Mother lies to protect her baby. That’s what parents do. But only until she’s old enough to handle the truth. To make the right decisions. What business does Hilary Swank have mucking things up, like she’s some kind of friend to Daughter or something, maybe even an alternate mother? So what if they’re the same species…that they’re a species! Mother is just trying to do her best, for the good of her daughter and the planet, which wouldn’t be in this shape if it weren’t for you lousy…. What more do you want?

I Am Mother really is a satisfying and thoughtful watch, with plenty of great camera work and effects, and fine performances from Swank and Clara Ruugard as Daughter. Mother’s anthropoid suit (it’s a dude inside!—Luke Hawker!) is a pretty genius piece of craftsmanship, too. It looks sort of like Honda’s ASIMO in wedge heels, but it’s three times his size and has the profile of a bodybuilder. Mother may be capable of a disarming, well-timed smile, but she’s threatening as…well…a mother when she gallops at a full tilt to protect her project…I mean…kid.

Despite being minimally humanoid in terms of a face, Mother’s body convincingly performs all the roles we project on our mothers: protector, teacher, nurse, threat. You really don’t want to disappoint her, but once your life and the human race is at stake, it’s still hard to break away. Then again, are you certain she has ill designs? There’s a constant sense of instability here as we struggle to understand what protection means in the world of this film, as we recall all the bent little half-truths we were told to keep us safe back then. And we turned out all right, didn’t we? You’ll have to go to theater to see if the same is true for Daughter and her passle of brothers and sisters. You’ll have the opportunity, no doubt, so don’t miss it.

See all our Sundance coverage here.