1 An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
Robert Redford’s festival in Utah opened yesterday with this, the former vice-president Al Gore’s follow-up to his 2006 Oscar-winning documentary on the perils of climate change, An Inconvenient Truth. The new film is a “cinéma vérité travelogue” that follows Gore through the corridors of power, talking to world leaders including Vladimir Putin.
2 Wind River
As one Oscar season ends, another begins, usually at Sundance, and there is much talk about Wind River, the directorial debut of the writer Taylor Sheridan (Sicario and Hell or High Water). The new film is set on a Native American reservation where a body is found by a US Fish and Wildlife Service agent played by Jeremy Renner. Elizabeth Olsen plays the FBI rookie who is sent to investigate. Expect a western with Scandi-noir touches as the two set out into the icy winter landscapes of Wyoming.
3 Manifesto
We knew Cate Blanchett was multitalented, but here’s proof that she’s multifaceted too — an art-house film that began as a video installation in which she plays 13 characters, including a teacher, a housewife, a TV anchor and a hairy tramp, reciting manifestos by artists and thinkers from Karl Marx to Jim Jarmusch.
4 A Ghost Story
As Casey Affleck is tipped for a best actor Oscar for Manchester by the Sea, he is reunited with David Lowery, the director who a few years ago at Sundance cast him in the powerful Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. This time Affleck is playing a dead man haunting his old lover (Rooney Mara).
5 Call Me By Your Name
From the Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who made the wonderful rock-star drama A Bigger Splash with Ralph Fiennes, comes this gay coming-of-age story involving a teenage boy (Timothée Chalamet), a hunky visiting American in the form of Armie Hammer and acres of Mediterranean beaches and ancient Greek and Roman artefacts. What could possibly happen?
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6 Landline
Gillian Robespierre, who made what was surely the world’s first abortion comedy, Obvious Child, is back with an adultery comedy set in Manhattan in 1995. It stars the comedian Jenny Slate, Edie Falco and John Turturro and is about “three women in one family having lots of sex, drugs and Japanese food. Navigating monogamy, honesty and a long-lost New York, the Jacobs family lives in the last days when people still didn’t have cell phones and still did smoke inside.”
7 The Polka King
Jenny Slate also appears in what’s billed as “the first polka Ponzi-scheme film”, directed by Maya Forbes. Jack Black and Jason Schwarztman star in the true story of Jan Lewan, a Polish immigrant who became a polka-music legend and a convicted fraudster.
8 78/52
Hardcore film geeks will relish this breakdown of the 78 shot set-ups and 52 edits that made up Hitchcock’s famous shower scene in Psycho. Director Alexandre O Philippe breaks down the three-minute sequence shot by shot, with added background. Quite how this makes a one-and-a-half-hour documentary remains to be seen.
9 Long Strange Trip
From the world of psychedelic vinyl comes a four-hour Grateful Dead documentary. Amir Bar-Lev’s film, produced by Martin Scorsese, purports to be “an unvarnished look at the life of the Dead” and covers their trajectory from their incarnation as the Warlocks to their seminal concert in 1973 at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. Includes interviews with all the living band members and previously unseen footage that will bring undiluted joy to Deadheads.
10 Bushwick
Just as the hippy counterculture exploded in the Nixon era, so the counterculture of cinema seems to be experiencing a pre-Trump moment. It can’t be a reaction since all these films were made a year or so earlier, but you are never far from a dystopian-future scenario at Sundance. Bushwick is set during a new American civil war with Texas seceding from the Union and opposing factions fighting in New York. Bushwick, in Brooklyn (a convenient destination for hipster film-makers), becomes an urban warzone and Brittany Snow (Pitch Perfect) and Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy) fight for their lives. Is post-truth stranger than fiction?