That's a wrap for Sundance 2021. If you want to see how I rank what I saw: here's my list

But, this was a pretty good festival.

The standouts for me were:

1.) Passing, a beautifully delicate and ravishing look at navigating biracial identity in the late 20s.

2.) Mayday, a somewhat uneven, but nonetheless ambitious and unbelievably refreshing sci-fi film about a band of women who act as sirens, drawing damned soldiers' souls into a kind of limbo to…

Here's Johnny!

Back in middle and high school, I had a banged up ipod video (the garish black and red U2 edition) that I treasured. It was glued to my hip those days and I'd load up the chunky piece of hardware with as many movies as I could convince my parents to buy or as I could buy with itunes gift cards I'd stock up on at the holidays. Late nights were spent huddled beneath my covers, door slightly…

If there is one thing Noyer does right, it is find inventive and sublimely ludicrous ways to kill Alexis’s victims. There is a spectacular torture device, early on, hooked up to Alexis’s mix table which editors Vertti Virkajärvi and Hannu Aukia expertly cut between, effortlessly obscuring the nastiest bits of violence only to highlight Alexis’s euphoric, artistic trance. It is an absurd sequence, only outdone by the escalation of later kills, but it sets the tone and tempo for the…

Tonight a comedian died in New York.

Snyder's apocalyptic vision of Gods and men. Well, one of them anyway.

Here, I think he is at his most refined. He is slavish to the images and words of Moore's monumental work. This is Snyder's general M.O. But, it works, here, on two levels. One, Dave Gibbons original images are superb, full of grit, both grotesque and gorgeous. To reproduce them in cinematic form is to produce great images, now filtered through…