Sundance review: 'Binti' is an exuberant kids' film with a timely message

‘Binti’

★★★1/2

Playing in the Kids section of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 90 minutes: in Dutch, with English subtitles.

Screens again: Sunday, Jan. 26, 3:30 p.m., Redstone 1 (Park City); Thursday, Jan. 30, 6:30 p.m., Prospector (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 1 p.m., Redstone 2 (Park City).

——

If American kids’ movies were as naturally energetic, and as willing to explore some hard emotional truths, as the Belgian movie “Binti,” our children and Hollywood would be much better for it.

Newcomer Bebel Tshiani Baloji plays Binti, a 12-year-old girl who was born in Congo but is living her best life in Antwerp, Belgium. She runs around with her cameraphone, recording her daily doings and posting the results on her YouTube channel, which has a thousand subscribers — which is pretty good, but nothing compared to her idol, actress and TV presenter Tatyana Beloy (who appears as herself).

Binti lives with her dad, Jovial (played by the actress’ father, the one-named Belgian rapper Baloji), a poet and artist. They live in a crowded but happy squatters’ building, until the police raid the place looking for undocumented immigrants — which Binti and Jovial are. The pair elude the police, and end up in a small wood, where Binti hides in a backyard treehouse.

Binti soon is confronted by the owner of the treehouse, Elias (Mo Bakker), who’s the same age as Binti. Elias is obsessed with saving the okapi from extinction, and quickly enlists Binti to help with his campaign. Soon Binti and, after a while, Jovial are welcomed by Elias’ mom, Christine (Joke Devynck), a children’s fashion designer. The arrival of these strangers doesn’t sit well with Chrisine’s neighbor Floris (Frank Dierens), who has romantic designs on Christine.

Writer-director Frederike Migom keeps the tone light and breezy, taking her cue from her endlessly energetic leading lady. But Migom is not timid about diving into tough subject matter, like the plight of refugees and undocumented immigrants, in ways that respect the intelligence of the movie’s young audience. Hollywood could learn from this.

There are a few clunky bits in the script, such as plot points that rely on people misunderstanding overheard conversations. But Migom’s visual inventiveness, and the genuine chemistry between father and daughter Baloji, carry “Binti” over any rough patches.

Sundance review: Punk-fueled comedy 'Dinner in America' starts sour but ends up sweet

‘Dinner in America’

★★★

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 107 minutes.

Screens again: Saturday, Jan. 25, 11:59 p.m., Broadway 6 (Salt Lake City); Sunday, Jan. 26, 8:30 a.m., Prospector (Park City); Friday, Jan, 31, 3:30 p.m., Eccles (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 2:30 p.m., The MARC (Park City).

——

Possibly the most punk-rock musical romance since “Sid & Nancy,” but with a happier ending (really, could there be a sadder one?), writer-director-editor Adam Carter Rehmeier’s “Dinner in America” is a middle finger to suburbia, conformity, and anyone who only watches the first 15 minutes.

I haven’t seen a movie work so hard to make me hate its protagonist in the opening scenes than this one. We meet Simon (Kyle Gallner) drooling into his lunch, thanks to the pharmaceuticals he’s taking as a test subject. He gets kicked out of the trial the same time as Beth (Hannah Marks), another drooler, and she invites him to her place for Sunday dinner — where chaos ensues involving Beth’s amorous mom (Lea Thompson), a projectile turkey, and Simon’s penchant for arson.

Having firmly established Simon as a self-destructive jerk, Rehmeier moves on to the other side of this story, a socially awkward young woman named Patty (Emily Skeggs). Patty works a menial job in a pet store, shoots baskets alone in her driveway, and sends Polaroids of herself masturbating to the masked punk-rock singer John Q. Public. When Patty meets Simon, when she helps him elude the Detroit cops, her first request is that he take her to see John Q.’s band, Psyops — something Simon has a lot of trouble with, for reasons Rehmeier eventually reveals.

Simon’s presence also changes the dynamic in Patty’s family, with high-strung little brother Kevin (Griffin Gluck) and her strait-laced parents (Pat Healy and Mary Jane Rajskub) causing Patty much stress. Then there are the obnoxious track athletes who tease Patty on the bus, who soon feel Simon’s wrath.

There’s a gleeful anarchy alive in “Dinner in America,” and Rehmeier is the sort whose goals are humor first and narrative coherence second, maybe third. That’s tough to swallow in the movie’s frantic early passages, but when the movie settles into the dynamic of aggro Simon and oddball Patty, it’s a solid story with a surprisingly sweet center.

Sundance review: Young women take a harrowing trip in riveting 'Never Rarely Sometimes Always'

‘Never Rarely Sometimes Always’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic section of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 101 minutes.

Screens again: Saturday, Jan. 25, noon, Resort (Sundance); Sunday, Jan. 26, 9 a.m., PC Library (Park City); Monday, Jan. 27, 3:45 p.m., Broadway 3 (Salt Lake City); Wednesday, Jan. 29, Eccles (Park City); Thursday, Jan. 30, 12:30 p.m., Redstone 1 (Park City).

——

Writer-director Eliza Hittman takes a stark and unflinching look at abortion in “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” a drama that doesn’t talk about a teen girl’s wrenching decision than show the emotional stakes of making it.

Seventeen-year-old Autumn (played with soul and steel by Sidney Flanigan) is feeling ill. She goes to a clinic in her rural Pennsylvania town, where she is offered a “self-administered” test — the same one she could have bought at the pharmacy. The women there give her an ultrasound, and tell Autumn she’s about 10 weeks pregnant. They give her brochures about adoption and show a horror-show propaganda video. (Hittman never says it outright, but the “clinic” has the earmarks of an anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy center.”)

After Googling about ways to self-induce an abortion, she decides she needs to go to a real clinic. Since Pennsylvania requires parental consent for girls under 18 to have an abortion, she decides her only option is to go to New York City. Autumn’s cousin, Skylar (Talia Ryder), offers to go with her — and, for good measure, steals some cash from the till at the supermarket where they both work as cashiers.

Many of Autumn and Skylar’s interactions on their trip to New York, where they have some harrowing encounters as they are forced to stay overnight, go without dialogue. Hittman (who last came to Sundance with the coming-of-age drama “Beach Rats”) doesn’t have to fill the silences with gab, so she doesn’t — and the emotional communication between these cousins happens through glances and body language.

Flanigan, who never acted before, and Ryder use that quiet chemistry to convey the horrors of being young women in a society where men casually push their dominance on them, in ways large and small. Watching them navigate that minefield is probably all-too-relatable to women in the audience, and a shameful revelation to the men.

Slamdance review: A daughter tries to figure out her father in thoughtful, enigmatic 'Film About a Father Who'

‘Film About a Father Who’

★★★1/2

Playing at the Slamdance Film Festival. Running time: 74 minutes.

Screens again: Monday, Jan. 27, 11 a.m., Ballroom, Treasure Mountain Inn (Park City).

–––––

Director Lynne Sachs’ documentary “Film About a Father Who” poses an intriguing question about fathers and their children — and whether the child can ever truly know what is going on in their parent’s head.

Sachs tries to make sense of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., through footage accumulated for 35 years, from home movies in 1984 to interviews taken from the ‘90s to now. The footage spans all formats, from 8mm and 16mm film to VHS, Hi-8 and digital. The different formats serve as historical markers, and also showing how intimate the moments become, with the older film more formal and the tape and digital cameras becoming less obtrusive and more ubiquitous, to the point where people act like they’re not there.

The work Lynne Sachs does to understand her dad starts from the outside and works its way in. We see Ira Sachs Sr. as an enthusiastic and iconoclastic businessman, splitting between Memphis, Tenn. — where he and his first wife, Diane, raised Lynne and two siblings (including the filmmaker Ira Sachs Jr.) — and Park City, Utah. (One of his best known properties in Utah was the original Yarrow Hotel, now the DoubleTree by Hilton.) He worked hard, loved getting out onto the land he was developing, and loved working while playing, made easier as an early adopter of cellular phones.

Women are a constant presence in Ira’s life. Ira and Diane were divorced by the time Lynne started the film formally in 1991, and Ira was married to his much-younger separate wife, Diana, with whom Ira had three more kids. There are also girlfriends, and three more siblings, though that takes some sorting out for the audience. But most important was Judy, aka Maw-Maw, Ira Sr.’s mother, who maintained a hold on Ira Sr., both emotionally and financially, well into his adulthood.

Taking visual cues from modern art, and a title borrowed from Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 drama “Film About a Woman Who…,” Lynne Sachs compiles a film that’s as colorful, as complex, and sometimes as inscrutable as her father. She may not have unlocked the secret of her father’s heart, but the attempt reveals touching, humorous and painful insights about what we think a father is and what he should be.

Sundance review: Stellar performance by Nicole Beharie provides uplift 'Miss Juneteenth' needs

‘Miss Juneteenth’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 103 minutes.

Screens again: Saturday, Jan. 25, noon, Rose Wagner (Salt Lake City); Sunday, Jan. 26, 9 p.m., Resort (Sundance); Monday, Jan. 27, noon, PC Library (Park City); Wednesday, Jan. 29, noon, Temple (Park City); Thursday, Jan. 30, 3:30 p.m., Eccles (Park City).

——

There’s a grand tradition of independent movies about plucky strivers, fending off poverty and juggling the bills to make their American dream come true — and such films work, as writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples’ “Miss Juneteenth” does, if the details and the actor at the center are perfect.

Turquoise Jones, played beautifully by Nicole Beharie, won the pageant title of Miss Juneteenth back in 2004, but never got to make good on the boost it’s supposed to provide young black women. Turquoise wants her own about-to-be 15-year-old daughter, Kai (Alexis Chikaeze), to enter the contest, to win the full-ride scholarship to a historically black college or university and make the escape from Fort Worth, Texas, that Turquoise didn’t.

To make that happen, Turquoise has to navigate a financial minefield. She works double shifts at the barbecue joint owned by the avuncular Wayman (Marcus Mauldin). She wheedles money out of her unreliable estranged husband, Ronnie (Kendrick Sampson). She foregoes the power bill to pay Kai’s pageant fees, and so on.

Along the way, Turquoise dismisses Kai’s interest in trying out for the school dance/drill team. She also tries to counter her daughter’s lack of enthusiasm for Miss Juneteenth — a pageant named for the holiday among African Americans marking when word first arrived in Texas of the Emancipation Proclamation, two years after Lincoln signed it.

Peoples has an eye for the details of the Jones family’s life, scraping by on her wits while trying to touch the upper class life the pageant represents. That split is emphasized when Wayman snorts at Turquoise’s evocation of the American dream. “There ain’t no American dream for black people — we just try to hang on to what we have.”

Without Beharie at the movie’s center, though, all of Peoples’ details would be for naught. Beharie (familiar, to some, for her role on the series “Sleepy Hollow”) captures Turquoise’s optimism that she can make her life better, the tenacity that she will do it without a man, and the frustration at the obstacles in her way. Beharie overcomes those obstacles, and makes “Miss Juneteenth” a winner.

Sundance review: 'Aggie' is a fond portrait of an arts patron, but her toughest work gets short shrift

‘Aggie’ 

★★1/2

Playing in the Documentary Premieres section of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 92 minutes.

Screens again: Sunday, Jan. 26, 4 p.m., Redstone 2 (Park City); Monday, Jan. 27, 9:45 p.m., Broadway 3 (Salt Lake City); Friday, Jan. 31, 3 p.m., Temple (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 9 p.m., Resort (Sundance). 

——

Being a good person doesn’t automatically make one a good subject for a documentary, as the meandering narrative of “Aggie” unfortunately proves.

The title figure is Agnes Gund, contemporary art collector, philanthropist, president emerita of the board of the Museum of Modern Art and chairwoman of MoMA’s offshoot PS1. She has befriended a great many artists over the years, starting with Roy Lichtenstein in the ‘60s through creative minds today. And, at 82, she seems as energetic and engaged as people half her age.

The problem with “Aggie,” the movie, is that the filmmaker — her daughter, Catherine Gund, who has directed such well-received documentaries as “What’s On Your Plate?” and “Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity” — is too close to her subject, for obvious reasons, to extract much unknown information about Agnes. She tries to get around this by catching Agnes in conversation with other people, including radio reporter Maria Hinojosa, auteur John Waters, and three of Agnes’ grandchildren. But none of these “interviewers” dig deep into what makes Agnes tick.

The film’s structure is haphazard, roughly a chronological narrative of Agnes’ life, though taking some side roads into her childhood that don’t do enough to illuminate her work today. And that work — launching the Art and Justice Fund to battle mass incarceration, using the $165 million she got for selling a Lichtenstein painting in 2017 — is far too interesting to be left for the film’s last few minutes. What could have been the grist for an entire movie is treated like an infomercial tagged onto the end of a fond but forgettable portrait.

Sundance review: 'Zola' is the bat-crap crazy only-in-Florida stripper comedy you've been looking for

‘Zola’

★★★

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 90 minutes.

Screens again: Saturday, Jan. 25, 12:15 p.m., The Grand (Salt Lake City); Saturday, 11:45 p.m., Egyptian (Park City); Sunday, Jan. 27, 3 p.m., Resort (Sundance); Tuesday, Jan. 29, 11:45 a.m., The Ray (Park City); Friday, Jan. 31, 8:30 a.m., The MARC (Park City).

——

A rapid-fire comedy not for the prudish, director Janicza Bravo’s “Zola” finds caustic humor in what many consider to be the craziest story ever told on Twitter.

In 2015, in 144 tweets, A’ziah “Zola” King told of the time she and a “friend” of hers, Stefani, took time off from their work at a strip club to take a weekend trip to Florida — where, as is all too common for Florida, all kinds of crap went down.

As told here, Zola (Taylour Paige) is a sensible young woman who knows working as a stripper pays better than waitressing — but she has limits, like not doing private shows and not prostituting herself. If only Zola had known, before Stefani (Riley Keough) talked her into going to Florida to dance at some clubs for some fast money, that Stefani did not work under such limitations.

Zola, Stefani, her boyfriend Derek (Nicholas Brand), and a guy (Colman Domingo) whose name Zola would not hear for the first 48 hours of their trip, all pile into an SUV and drive to the Tampa area. While Derek sits at a crappy hotel, the nameless guy takes Zola and Stefani to a nicer hotel — which is when Zola learns that the guy is Stefani’s pimp, and that the guy expects Stefani and Zola to make some money for him. (These scenes have some explicit male nudity, and are not for the squeamish.)

Bravo (who brought the discomfort-centered comedy “Lemon” to Sundance in 2017) and her co-writer, Jeremy O. Harris, spin Zola’s yarn with all the “can you believe this?” immediacy of a good Twitter thread. (The regular tweet sound effects make it feel like the audience is following along to King’s original posts.) Much of Bravo’s humor comes from the larger-than-life characters, and the way the cast captures them — from Domingo’s cold-blooded thug to Brand’s dim bulb hick, and especially Keough’s trailer-trash inflections.

Holding it all together is Paige, who does more with a side-eye glance than most actors do with a sonnet. It’s through Paige’s Zola that we witnesses the increasingly strange antics, and she takes us through the fire and out with charm and wit.

Sundance review: Friendship turns toxic in 'The Climb,' a sharp and hilarious comedy

“The Climb”

★★★★

Playing in the Spotlight program of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 98 minutes.

Screens again: Saturday, Jan. 25, 3 p.m., Rose Wagner (Salt Lake City); Sunday, Jan. 26, 6:30 p.m., The Ray (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 6 p.m., PC Library (Park City).

The Jan. 26 screening will be simultaneously shown, with the Q&A, at 10 theaters nationwide (tickets on sale here):

 • Bow Tie Cinemas Harbour 9, Annapolis, Md.

 • Cedar Lee Theatre, Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

 • Cinema Arts Theatre, Fairfax, Va.

 • Harkins Theatres Tempe Marketplace 16, Tempe, Ariz.

 • Landmark’s Kendall Square Cinema, Cambridge, Mass.

 • Landmark’s Keystone Art Cinema, Indianapolis, Ind.

 • Landmark’s Lagoon Cinema, Minneapolis, Minn.

 • Landmark’s Ritz Five, Philadelphia, Pa.

 • Prado Stadium 12, Bonita Springs, Fla.

 • Sun-Ray Cinema, Jacksonville, Fla.

——

Michael Angelo Covino’s quietly devastating comedy “The Climb” is a hilarious and lacerating look at what happens when your best friend is also your — and his own — worst enemy.

Covino and his real-life best pal Kyle Marvin wrote the film, and play longtime best friends Mike and Kyle, who we meet while on a long bike ride in the French countryside. Kyle is enthusiastic about his upcoming marriage to Ava (Judith Godrèche), but in the middle of the ride, Mike delivers some bad news: Mike slept with Ava. It was before Kyle and Ava started dating, Mike says — but then he adds “it also happened in the present.”

Kyle, struggling to catch up to Mike on his bike, yells, “if I catch you, I’m going to kill you!” Mike replies, “I know. That’s why I waited for the hill.” Kyle tells Mike he won’t be Kyle’s best man — even though Mike has already written his speech.

The entire bike ride, and the fight with a motorist that follows, is all captured in one fluid take — a real one, not a phony “1917” job. Covino and cinematographer Zach Kuperstein do this neat trick over and over again throughout the film, each long segment carefully choreographed to take in all the action but feeling spontaneous and improvised.

One scene takes place in a hospital. Another is at a funeral. Still another is at a Christmas party with Kyle’s parents (Talia Balsam and George Wendt), where we meet Marissa, a high-school flame who re-entered Kyle’s life after his relationship with Ava fell apart. 

Each time, Mike is there, simultaneously maintaining his friendship and sabotaging Kyle’s life. It’s not that Mike is intentionally cruel or spiteful. It’s just that he’s so screwed up, so full of self-loathing, that his internalized toxicity spreads to everyone else — and since Kyle is his best friend, Kyle gets the strongest dose of that poisonous attitude.

Covino and Marvin — who co-wrote this comedy, adapting their short film of the same name — display a flip, easygoing chemistry of two guys who have known each other for ages, and their back-and-forth banter produces laughs in the most mundane of exchanges. Adding a tart counterpoint to the pair is Rankin, who brings out the best,  by which I mean the worst, out of both guys.

“The Climb” is one of those comedies that so feels so effortless, like a natural progression of events, that it’s easy to overlook how much intelligence and craft that went into it. Covino and Marvin demonstrate that they could be the next great movie comedy team, if they’re willing to keep climbing.

Sundance review: ‘Miss Americana’ is an eye-opening look at Taylor Swift finding a new voice

There’s a scene early on in “Taylor Swift: Miss Americana” that shows that this won’t be another movie-length home video of a pampered pop star.

It happens on the day in 2018 when the Grammy nominations are announced. Swift is on a couch, on the phone to someone — presumably an agent or a publicist — who delivers the bad news that Swift’s album “Reputation” did not get nominated in the major categories. (Ultimately, it received just one nomination, for pop vocal album, but lost to Ariana Grande’s “Sweetener.”)

Swift replies, “this is good, this is fine,” but it’s obvious that it isn’t. But she seems less upset at the Grammy voters than at herself for making an album that wasn’t up to her standards.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Sundance's opening night brought tales of political awakenings, for summer campers and a pop icon

The first two movies that played in the Sundance Film Festival’s big room, the Eccles Theatre in Park City, on the festival’s opening night was that they told stories of people finding their voice as activists.

The first, “Crip Camp,” told of a summer camp for disabled kids in New York’s Catskills Mountains in the 1970s, and how the kids who went there went on to become fighters for the rights of the disabled. Here’s my account of the opening screening, as seen on sltrib.com.

The other, “Taylor Swift: Miss Americana,” shows the pop icon pushing herself to develop an adult voice, both musically and in the political arena. Here’s my recounting of the Q&A with Swift and director Lana Wilson, also on sltrib.com.