With snow on the ground and a cloud of uncertainty hanging over its next-to-last edition in Park City, the 41st annual Sundance Film Festival returns to its high-altitude Utah home, where the country’s most important showcase for independent cinema will unspool in person from Jan. 23-Feb. 2, 2025. While “discovery” remains the focus of the […]

There’s a downside to our ocean-of-content culture: It can be overwhelming. Scanning all those titles, all those options, you feel at moments like you’re drowning in possibility. Yet there’s a serious upside as well. In cinema, it’s not just that the endless options are enticing in their multiplicity — it’s that a great movie can […]

Long before Peter Jackson took a swing at “The Lord of the Rings,” audiences got a glimpse into the fantasy realm of J.R.R. Tolkien via a trio of late-’70s animated projects: two animated TV specials produced by Rankin/Bass (of which “The Hobbit” remains fairly well-liked) and a dark and ominous big-screen feature from Ralph Bakshi […]

Why? That one-word question bobs up more than once in “Freediver,” director Michael John Warren’s often fascinating documentary about Alexey Molchanov, a champion in a sport to which audiences may not have given much thought but won’t soon forget. Based on a piece by Daniel Riley published in GQ magazine in 2021, the movie begins […]

Those who grew up watching FX-heavy seriocomic mainstream creature features of the 1980s and ’90s may enjoy the nostalgic fun had at their expense in “The Invisible Raptor.” Viewers resistant to a landslide of scatological humor, however, may find the laughs pretty slim in this overlong, uninspired monster spoof. Director Mike Hermosa’s indie feature is […]

Tyler Perry has dedicated the past quarter-century of his career to giving voice to Black women on stage and screen. With “The Six Triple Eight,” the self-made mogul — who leveraged his success to build a production studio on a former U.S. Army base outside Atlanta — has found a story ideally suited to his […]

The difference between being laughed at and having others laugh with you is perfectly exemplified in how the overweight young protagonist in stop-motion filmmaker Kristina Dufková’s coming-of-age story “Living Large” is treated by those around him. Bespectacled Ben Pipetka (Tyler Joseph Gay in the English-language dub) has an affinity for cooking elaborate meals and is […]

Cigarette ash piles on top of a few discarded CDs inside a darkened room where the members of a rock band, Los Planetas, struggle to make tracks for their new album. That brief shot conveys more than the mere disarray of the space. Those likely ruined discs symbolize a certain anarchic disregard for music as […]

One of the more engaging figures in Ondi Timoner’s 2022 documentary, “The Last Flight Home” — about the decision of her 92-year-old father, Eli Timoner, to use California’s end-of-life option — was the director’s sister, Rachel. A rabbi, Rachel Timoner brought a pastoral warmth and spiritual insight to the sorrows and joys, rites and spiritual […]