The Movies We Loved From Sundance This Year

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.