The Movies We Loved From Sundance This Year

In Sebastian Silva’s Rotting in the Sun, the casualness with which many queer men have sex, sometimes in full view of whoever, is captured with a candor and explicitness not seen (at least to this extent) since Frank Ripploh’s Taxi Zum Klo (1981). Try as we might, we may never return to the levels of debauchery present in the post-liberation/pre-AIDS idyll of the ‘70s, but at least now one of our movies looks like it. There are sausage parties and then there is Rotting in the Sun, in which dick is cheap, plentiful, and offered by the foot onscreen. Silva and comedian Jordan Firstman play (versions of) themselves—when they meet at the gay beach destination Zipolite in Mexico, Silva is mulling suicide while Firstman is reveling in his seemingly carefree influencer life. He demands Silva collaborate on a show with him, though his own self-absorption mitigates whatever ego-inflation Silva might derive from the request. (Upon meeting, Firstman tells him that he had just been watching Silva’s 2013 movie Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus, underlining the coincidence of running into him the day after doing so by pointing out it was a movie that “no one saw.”) The auteur-influencer tension persists as Silva parties with Firstman, who annoys the shit out of him and posts footage of the director snorting ketamine to his Instagram stories. But things turn around after Silva meets with HBO and the only idea of his they find interesting is a collaboration with Firstman. Before they can get to work, something shocking occurs to twist the dynamic yet again.

Silva juggles so much within his budgetary constraints, and the result is something that is consistently surprising and perpetually thoughtful about what power and privilege look like on the ground. Firstman boldly flaunts his obnoxiousness (as well as his dick and sexuality—he’s frequently nude and one scene begins with a dick plopping out of his mouth as he’s having group sex), but he also offers a considerable amount of charm. He embodies the kind of confidence of someone with nearly a million followers on Instagram, a kind of inherent self-possession driven by the simple fact that people can’t and won’t look away. After Infinity Pool, this was my favorite thing I watched via Sundance.

Somewhere in the middle of Brandon Cronenberg’s wild Infinity Pool, a concerned woman named Em (Cleopatra Coleman) asks her husband, with whom she is vacationing at a resort on the fictional island of Li Tolqa, “Is this a dream? It would make more sense.” Indeed! Cronenberg has crafted a nightmare orgy of extreme, disorienting imagery (he loves a neon psychedelic collage) that frightens most severely by what isn’t shown. It’s a hell of a balance the writer-director is striking, this bombarding and withholding, and the effect is an uber-pervy Lynchian vision that narratively manages to cross many of its T’s and dot most of its I’s. The fear comes not from being unaware of what’s going on, but of what’s going to happen next. It’s like being in a foreign country, learning as you go, and understanding at every turn just how out of your depth you are.

In that way, the movie impressively implants in its viewers’ minds the far-out experience of protagonist James (Alexander Skarsgård), a creatively bereft writer whose last (and first) book came out six years ago. He’s come to Li Tolqa for inspiration, though he admits that doing so on a resort is pathetic. “You’re so frozen these days, I can’t even tell if you’re sleeping or awake,” his wife Em tells him. Via jumpy editing and a reclining kind of haze, Infinity Pool weaves its spell. It takes us to a parallel universe, but then, so does vacation, when our priorities scramble and for a brief period, we live different lives. Infinity Pool’s might be the worst vacation ever—or the best, depending on your appetite for depravity.

THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM JEZEBEL’S REVIEW OF “INFINITY POOL.” READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE.

A documentary as charming and open-hearted as its novelist subject, Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok’s Judy Blume Forever traces the career arc of an author who did as much to shape contemporary young adult fiction as virtually anyone else in history. Blume has lost nothing of her frankness in the 50 years since the publication of Deenie, to name one of her YA classics. Early on in the documentary, we see the author (who’s now 84) reading from that book about a young girl with scoliosis—specifically the notorious passage in which protagonist Deenie masturbates, which is framed by Blume as something positive and pleasurable. Then Blume addresses the crew: “Let’s raise our hands if we masturbate. Everybody!”

Blume’s willingness to address the underrepresented issues that young people were curious about made her books both essential reading (especially in pre-internet times) and the target of right-wing furor. Her books were banned, society was warned about her danger in a pamphlet distributed by Phyllis Schlafly, and she sparred with Pat Buchanan on an episode of Crossfire. People took her to task for her refusal to repress or overlook the truth, and her message is as relevant as ever given the right’s renewed devotion to suppressing honest speech about sexuality. Interviews with some stars like Lena Dunham and Molly Ringwald, as well as cut-out animation sequences set to notable passages from books, keep things moving at a peppy clip.

It’s stated upfront that the simple act of reclamation is of paramount importance to The Stroll’s director/subject. “When I was approached to be a subject of a documentary, I knew that could be a segue into filmmaking. But what I discovered is I didn’t have control of my own story. And so it really motivated me to start my journey as a director. I was determined to make a film about the Stroll,” explains Kristen Lovell, who previously appeared in the 2007 doc Queer Streets, discussing the sex work she performed on and around the Meatpacking District, way before it received its Apple-assisted makeover. Back then, it was a hub of sex work—that particular meat market was known as “the Stroll”—and many of those who provided their services were trans women of color. Lovell has collected a handful of such women, some of whose tenure go back to the early ‘80s, to recount their stories.

Co-directed with Zackary Drucker, The Stroll (which won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award: Clarity of Vision) is full of stories about turning tricks on the streets, some hilarious, some harrowing. It’s a story of community, which provided a safety net (“These girls taught me how to survive,” says Lovell), but also which remained on the fringes of the broader queer community, in no small part because of white gay men’s reluctance to accept gender-nonconforming sex workers into their world. Lovell and Drucker convincingly draw a line from the shabby treatment trans icon Sylvia Rivera received in the ‘70s, to the relatively meager turnout to protest the murder of Amanda Milan in broad daylight in 2000 (that this occurred in the wake of the widely protested murder of Matthew Shepherd was telling). The Stroll also traces 9/11’s impact on sex work on the Stroll (it all but dried it up) and the transition to digital (on sites like Craigslist), which revolutionized the industry by giving its workers the ability to screen clients and turn sex work into fetish work. So many people who worked the Stroll showed up to tell their stories, and they do so often with fondness—so much so that for a while the picture the documentary paints is idyllic. But don’t be fooled; only the survivors are still here to share their past. As Egyptt (who worked the Stroll from 1983 to 2001) points out, if there were a thousand girls who worked that area in the ‘80s, there are probably only five left. That imprecise figure is a grim reminder of the lack of value the wider culture has placed on trans lives. The Stroll offers a counterpoint, a solution, and hope for the future. Riveting stuff.

A zippy two-hander, writer director Chloe Domont’s debut feature Fair Play examines what it’s like to be a woman succeeding at a hedge fund, and the ensuing male fragility that taints the picture. Emily (a phenomenal Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) are an engaged couple who watch their relational bliss dry up when she gets the promotion that he thought was his. She tries to bring him up with her, despite a very clear skill-set disparity and, what’s worse, a lack of faith from management regarding his potential. While he starts to flail, she holds on, putting up with not just his shit, but shit from the finance bros she’s surrounded by. Complicating matters: No one at work knows that Emily and Luke are in a relationship (this may actually be a plot hole since they live together and HR would be aware of their shared residential address but whatever). This is the kind of situation where she is allowed no option but to take on the chin being called a “dumb fucking bitch” by her boss.

The toxic environment in the office, though, soon proves no match for Emily and Luke’s domestic life, which increasingly starts to look like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Really the question at the core of Fair Play is just how much Emily can withstand, and her ambition at first seems to offer her an unlimited threshold. She reaches one eventually, and while her vessel to that point is unsurprising, her arc is cathartic all the same. Netflix nabbed Fair Play for $20 million, and it has the kind of exhilarating pace and boldly rendered politics that may turn a little indie into a discursive sensation when it eventually hits the streamer.

Little Richard was a pioneer of rock and roll, as well as rock stardom, and he did it as a Black queer man, in a racist country that was also homophobic (if it acknowledged gayness at all). That’s to say that Black queer excellence was at the foundation of pop music in the United States. An extremely strong case is made for this rather straightforward though often neglected truth in the upcoming, wildly entertaining CNN/HBO Max doc Little Richard: I Am Everything, directed by Lisa Cortés. The doc synthesizes a trove of archival footage, testimonies from people who knew the legend (including Lee Angel, a woman with whom Richard was in a relationship and who considers herself the love of his life and vice versa), and sharp commentary from academics like Zandria Robinson, who trenchantly contextualizes the degree of theft involved in the ongoing neglect of Little Richard’s contribution to culture: “We’re using the wrong word when we talk about appropriation. Think about it as obliteration. When you take and then erase, you remove that entity’s capacity to be attached to this thing that they created, to make money from this thing that they created.”

I Am Everything shuffles from Little Richard’s early days (including his father’s rejection), his start and success in music, the white artists who covered his songs to acclaim (like Pat Boone and Elvis Presley), his religious awakening, and his renouncement of his sexuality—that last element is considered with a good amount of compassion. In less than two hours, Little Richard: I Am Everything presents a bold picture of a genius, contradictions and all. At one point, in an archival interview, Little Richard attributes his ability to work in white clubs during segregation to his effeminate presentation—all this before any sense of gay liberation, years before the Stonewall uprising. He wasn’t just talented or forward-thinking or savvy, he was magical.

Two things can be true at once: What other people think of us is none of our business, and yet so much of our literal business depends on what people think of us. In the cross section of this contradiction is where we find the protagonist of You Hurt My Feelings, author Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who’s trying to get a novel published years after her memoir was a bit of a literary sensation. These truths also guide and vex her husband Don (Tobias Menzies), a therapist with thorny clients (including a couple played by real-life spouses Amber Tamblyn and David Cross), and her interior-designer sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins in a career-best performance). The always-incisive writer-director Nicole Holofcener (Please Give, Friends with Money) probes the worth and necessity of external feedback hilariously but thoughtfully—in complete contrast to the high-octane bombardment of social media. The tension ratchets up when Beth overhears Don tell Sarah’s husband he actually doesn’t like Beth’s latest manuscript. That creates a rift that reminded me of the avalanche in Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film Force Majeure, but the characters here are too cerebral and realistic to completely shut down over such an admission. Holofcener is bemused by her characters’ anxiety, but she also has compassion to spare.

As an intimate portrait of a Chilean couple dealing with Alzheimer’s disease, you know The Eternal Memory will devastate before setting foot in the theater/finger on the remote. But you might not be prepared for are the parts that aren’t so straightforwardly sad—sections of this movie feature Augusto Góngora making light of his condition, with a baffled smile on his face and a real, can-you-believe-this-shit? vibe. When we meet the former journalist and his wife, actor Paulina Urrutia, they’ve been together 23 years (married for three). She doesn’t have dementia and dutifully cares for him, patiently reminding him early on of their history, which he seems to have forgotten entirely. He doesn’t even seem to recognize her as his wife.

His memory, though, is an ever-evolving force—it waxes and wanes. And yet there is concrete proof of his past. He covered the extensive effects of the 1973 Chilean coup d’état on television and at times seems to have perfect recall of those events, as well as people from his past. At other times, he doesn’t recognize his own reflection. He has anxious episodes, often at night—during one he says, “I don’t believe in anything anymore.” And there, by his side every time, is Paulina to talk him down. Oscar-nominated director Maite Alberdi takes a detached, Wiseman-esque approach to her subjects, and consequently her film is a sort of procedural explication of what keeps Augusto and Paulina’s love alive. When she reminds him yet again of their relationship later in the movie, he says, “That’s beautiful.” We can all see why.

There’s a strangeness lingering under the surface of writer-director A.V. Rockwell’s debut feature, but its extent is not revealed until its final act, so I’ll refrain from spoiling. A Thousand and One’s very premise is unique enough—it’s a domestic drama about poverty in ‘90s (into the ‘00s) Harlem. Though crime is all around, this is not a crime story—the focus here is on the structural integrity of a family. Musician Teyana Taylor leads as Inez, a young woman who’s fresh out of Rikers and determined to make a new start. When she learns her kid Terry (played by Aaron Kingsley Adetola at age 6, and then two other actors as the movie leaps forward in time) has landed in the hospital after an altercation with his foster mother, she kidnaps him, changes his name (and falsifies his documentation), and moves into a place in Harlem.

There’s a kind of heightened reality in their performances—they’re just a shade or two turned up from realism, and the effect is as nostalgic as the content. I found it charming and, in any event, it didn’t detract from the screenplay’s matter-of-factness regarding the daily lives of the underprivileged in a big city. Just capturing that alone and framing a drama around it is radical enough, and Rockwell packs in themes like gentrification, police brutality, and the changing administrative faces of the city. Rudy Giuliani’s dogged campaign against low-level crime like jaywalking and his straight-up racist stop-and-frisk policy get some mentions. (It’s odd, then, that for a movie that spans the mayoral tenure of Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, 9/11 goes unmentioned.)

A Thousand and One was honored with the U.S. dramatic grand jury prize at this year’s Sundance. It didn’t bowl me over to the extent that I wanted to hand it a trophy, but I did admire it and it felt oddly homey to me, like a genuine product of the timeframe it seeks to portray. Inez makes some terrible decisions but her reasons are generally clear, and Taylor’s performance is so endearing to make you root for her imperfect character.

In Susanna Fogel’s Cat Person, the film adaptation of Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story of the same name, what was “terrifyingly ordinary” on the page (to use the well-chosen words of my former colleague Hazel Cills) becomes straightforwardly terrifying (or at least, that’s the idea) and even lapses into a palpably cinematic unreality. Sigh. They had to ruin a good thing.

THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM JEZEBEL’S REVIEW OF “CAT PERSON.” READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE.

Ottessa Moshfegh often writes the kind of books that seem unfilmable. Her stories are not typically impossible or too narratively thorny to make for a coherent viewing experience (though her most recent novel, the divisive Lapvona, is both of those things). It’s more like the depths of human filth she mines are too raw for mass consumption, or at least that which film must translate literally. Take, for example, her debut novel Eileen, about a 24-year-old juvenile detention facility clerk who describes herself as “a loser, a square, a dingaling.” She’s lonely and obsessed with bodily functions, like an inmate’s masturbation and her own diarrhea that her regular use of laxatives produces. (I’ll spare you the infamously in-depth description of her watery stool, but rest assured that it goes above and beyond to prove her assertion that she is not exactly a “pleasant person.”) She lives in a 1964 Massachusetts town with her verbally abusive father and stews in her life’s filth:

I didn’t really mind getting bossed around by my father. I’d get angry and I loathed him, yes, but my fury gave my life a kind of purpose and running his errands killed time. That is what I imagined life to be: one long sentence of waiting out the clock.

The hands of director William Oldroyd (Lady Macbeth) have sculpted a more user-friendly Eileen, played by Thomasin McKenzie. This Eileen, like the one in the pages of Moshfegh’s book, masturbates at work and smells her fingers, but she doesn’t go the extra mile of pressing her unwashed hand into a retiring colleague’s to bid him goodbye. There are standards here. Eileen, who Moshfegh described in an interview with Jezebel as a “disgusting female character,” is more odd than anything. We see her entranced with pubic hair on soap, chewing boxed chocolates and then spitting them out, replacing her father’s empty gin bottles dutifully. Without Moshfegh’s brilliant first-person narration, Eileen is a kind of walking question mark, and McKenzie strikes a deft balance between quirk and dissociation. This Eileen has been seemingly crafted to invite people in, while her literary counterpart practically dared people to look away.

THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM JEZEBEL’S REVIEW OF “EILEEN.” READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE.

“You couldn’t make Pretty Baby now,” Brooke Shields concedes in Hulu’s upcoming two-part documentary on her life, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. “Or a Blue Lagoon. Or Endless Love.” Even before the string of movie roles that sexualized a young Shields, her modeling was pushing in that direction. In addition to 1980's Blue Lagoon and 1981's Endless Love, the notorious 1980 ads Shields shot for Calvin Klein jeans further commodified her supposed sexuality: “Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

One could make the case that Shields’ early career, as shepherded by her momager Teri Shields, was built on the notion of child as a sex object—and in a certain way, that is the case that the Lana Wilson-directed documentary does make, albeit with a good deal of compassion and context. But it is the 1978 film Pretty Baby by Louis Malle that remains the most notorious project in her body of work. To Shields’ quoted point, it’s astonishing that it got made, as it portrays the 12-year-old daughter of a sex worker in a New Orleans brothel whose virginity is auctioned off. As chronicled in the doc, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, the movie was extremely controversial, even by the wild-west standards of ‘70s cinema, not only for its plot but for Shields’ nudity (she was 11 when she filmed it).

THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM JEZEBEL’S REVIEW OF “PRETTY BABY.” READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE.

June 24, 2022, started unremarkably for documentary filmmaker Tracy Droz Tragos (Abortion: Stories Women Tell, Rich Hill). She was dropping her child off at summer camp in the Berkshires and had to swing by CVS to grab a disposable camera, as the camp didn’t allow cell phones. And then she heard it on the radio: The Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade. She got to work, capturing footage of response on the ground, and most revealingly, shooting a doctor fielding calls from women whose scheduled abortions the ruling had canceled. In Tragos’ documentary Plan C, which premiered at Sundance, we see said doctor advise a patient about using abortion pills just days after Dobbs: “Since you are in a state where abortion is banned, you don’t want to put them in vaginally, because if something happened and you went into the hospital, we don’t want to have anything where they can tell you actually took medication.”

THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM JEZEBEL’S REVIEW OF “PLAN C.” READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE.