Sundance Wrap-Up: 6 Films We Like and One We Disagree on

For the second year in a row, the Sundance Film Festival canceled its in-individual programs and went digital, wrapping up on Sunday night. It was really a feast, with additional than 80 documentary and narrative options. Listed here are 6 our main film critics in particular appreciated, and a single they disagree about.

Manohla Dargis

‘All That Breathes’

Directed by Shaunak Sen, “All That Breathes” is an immersive, haunting documentary portrait of two Muslim brothers in New Delhi who have committed their lives to rescuing birds, lots of afflicted by human beings and weather modify. With intimacy, a fantastic rating and some great macro cinematography — the birds loom big below — the film pays tribute to the brothers even as it underscores that persons on your own can’t help you save character.

At instances, Sen’s emphasis on visual lyricism more than data opens up unanswered questions. And whilst he draws notice to anti-Muslim sentiments, it is in no way obvious how Sen would like viewers to link these terrifying threats with the grim specter of species extinction. Even so, there is no denying the movie’s energy or its subject there’s also no denying the heartbreak of its pictures. The raptors perched on mountains of rubbish, the monkeys navigating overhead tangles of wires, the solitary turtle having difficulties to ascend a mound of debris — in the tale of interspecies coexistence, the animals have presently shed.

In her most recent documentary, Margaret Brown tells the tale that commences — even though does not close — with the discovery of the Clotilda, the previous recorded American slave ship. In 1860, a long time soon after the importation of enslaved peoples had been manufactured illegal in the United States, the ship sailed to Alabama. The men who owned and operated the Clotilda arrived at night and, just after bringing their captives ashore, torched the ship to disguise their criminal offense. The ship sunk, disappearing from see.

Brown tracks the intriguing attempts to get well the Clotilda, but her more true, a lot more vivid subjects are these who survived slavery. Some helped set up Africatown, a group north of Mobile in which a great deal of the documentary normally takes position. There, Brown visits with descendants, people today for whom slavery isn’t an abstraction but a residing memory that generations have carefully preserved and handed down. The motion picture loses some of its target midway, but the story of the Clotilda and where by Brown requires this documentary are very shifting.

‘Dos Estaciones’

For much of this elliptical, visually arresting Mexican drama, María García (Teresa Sánchez), a stolid and stoic loner, holds the center. María, a monument to an aged-fashioned way of everyday living, if just one who presents as nonbinary, owns the Jalisco tequila manufacturing unit that offers the motion picture its title. But occasions are challenging: a fungus is ruining the agave crops, and international-owned firms pose a danger to artisanal producers like María, who’s on your own bodily and existentially.

The director Juan Pablo González quickly grounds you in María’s life both with the seductive, velvety natural beauty of the cinematography and by concentrating on the materials problems of her everyday daily life, including the mesmerizing, labor-intense production of tequila, which you abide by from discipline to bottle. At 1 place, romance looms, and for a time the story shifts to a hairdresser, Tatín (Tatín Vera) a transgender lady, who with María, and many other people, produces a vivid, textured, entirely unexpected globe.

The titular heroine of this incredibly unclassifiable motion picture — performed by the Filipino singer and theater actress Sheila Francisco — is a sweet-natured, absent-minded lady of close to 70. She life (and frequently squabbles) with her developed son, stays on (primarily) welcoming terms with her former spouse and is haunted by the memory of her other son’s loss of life. She is also a domestically renowned action filmmaker, whose intricate emergence from retirement frames the director Martika Ramirez Escobar’s heartfelt, zany tribute to the magic of films and the ability of like.

Leonor’s closing script results in being a motion picture inside of the motion picture, but Ramirez Escobar’s metacinematic shenanigans never cease there. I counted at minimum four distinctive levels of reality in “Leonor Will Under no circumstances Die,” but there may well be extra. In any situation the enjoyable lies in the strategies they collide and overlap. This might seem like a much too-clever postmodern style mash-up, but someway the mixture of spouse and children melodrama, pulpy violence and surreal comedy incorporate up to the disarmingly tender portrait of an artist on the edge of the afterlife.

‘A Property Created of Splinters’

The reality that Simon Lereng Wilmont’s documentary explores is almost unbearably heartbreaking. In Lysychansk, in jap Ukraine, an institution gives short-term shelter for little ones whose life have been disrupted by alcoholism, domestic violence and unemployment, social troubles that war with Russia has created worse. The children uncover security and companionship with one particular a further and an endlessly affected individual staff members although ready to return to their dad and mom or, extra likely, to be transferred to orphanages or foster care.

Granted extraordinary entry to his topics, Wilmont proceeds with exemplary tact and sensitivity, weaving a heartbreaking tapestry that also glows with empathy and even reveals glimmers of mischief and delight. To be reminded of the vulnerability of young bodies and souls is wrenching, but there is also a thing thrilling about the honesty and tenacity of the youngsters and the commitment of their caretakers. It’s as if a Frederick Wiseman film had been reimagined by William Blake.

This Brazilian charmer is not in particular flashy, buzzy or provocative. It is a mild, closely observed household drama, shot in heat shades in Contagem, a metropolis in the point out of Minas Gerais. The principal characters — Wellington (Carlos Francisco), Tercia (Rejane Faria) and their children, Eunice (Camilla Damião) and Deivinho (Cícero Lucas) — just about every contend with crises that take a look at their unique perception of id and their bonds with 1 another.

Unfolding in the wake of Jair Bolsonaro’s election to Brazil’s presidency in 2018, their stories brush in opposition to social and political sore spots (involving race, do the job, sexuality and religion) that will rarely seem international to North American audiences. But “Marte Um,” fantastically directed by Gabriel Martins, is not a culture-war polemic or an ideological fable. It is a stirring case in point of — and a passionate argument for — the sort of humane realism that keeps motion pictures alive, and that in no way goes out of fashion.

Dargis vs. Scott

‘Sharp Stick’

Dargis I was on the lookout ahead to Lena Dunham’s “Sharp Stick,” about the sexual coming-of-age of Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth), a girl in her mid-20s. But the only detail that held me seeing is Dunham if anybody else experienced directed it, I would have bailed.

There’s no place in enumerating all the motives I dislike it — Okay, the unfunny Los Angeles stereotypes have been exasperating. But my most significant issue was the cloying and childlike Sarah Jo, whose narratively expedient naïveté labored my previous frayed nerve. When I wasn’t confused with irritation, I did recognize that Dunham has revisited the vexing, oft-troubling figure of the desiring, appealing young woman, a character that evokes Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Tennessee Williams’s Little one Doll and so on.

Scott My posture in arguments about Lena Dunham is always “yes, but.” Certainly, Sarah Jo’s unworldliness is overstated, some aspects of her sexual awakening appear like wishful considering, and the tonal shifts from silly to pretty to earnest to icky can be a lot. But “Sharp Stick” is intriguing to believe about partly since Dunham herself is wondering, relatively than (as so numerous of her Sundance friends and followers have finished) recycling clichés about lust, woman empowerment and family dysfunction. The unstable, scattershot good quality of this motion picture is to me evidence of her curiosity and a willingness to thrust out of her very own comfort and ease zone, if she even has a person.