Sarah Gadon
Black Bear goes to such lengths to get across a mundane idea that even its lack of meaning is forgivable in light of its wild viewing experience.
Kristy Strouse shares her first report from Sundance with three suspenseful features: High Tide, Black Bear and The Night House.
While it’s plot is relatively flimsy, American Woman thrives on the basis of its powerful performances, particularly those from Hong Chau and Sarah Gadon.
Dracula Untold tries to be a lot of different things – a PG-13 horror movie, a historical epic, a Gothic romance, a superhero origin story – and it does it all while at the same time trying to kick start an Avengers-style shared movie universe. Whether you call that ambitious or just the obvious product of too many cooks in the kitchen, it doesn’t succeed on every front. But remarkably enough, as a pure popcorn movie, it doesn’t completely fall apart, either.
Last year, Denis Villeneuve directed one of the most pleasant surprises of the year with Prisoners, an unrelentingly tense film about child abduction that presented intriguing moral questions while also providing satisfying twists and turns throughout. That filmed starred Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal has teamed up with Villeneuve again in Enemy, a much smaller and much, much more mind-bending film than Prisoners.