Sundance review: 'Ailey' is a lively documentary that chronicles the life of Alvin Ailey, and shows the art that's keeping his legacy alive

‘Ailey’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Monday, February 1. Running time: 95 minutes.

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In the PBS-produced documentary “Ailey,” director Jamila Wignot melds biography, history, social commentary and performance into a rich accounting of the life of dance pioneer Alvin Ailey.

His life is a remarkable one. Born in Texas in 1931, in the height of the Great Depression, to a single mother, Ailey endured the poverty of the South, before he and his mother moved to Los Angeles in 1943, during World War II. There, he first discovered dance, seeing the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo. He also saw the legendary dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham, and realized for the first time that a Black person could become a great dancer.

Moving to New York in 1954, Ailey’s founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre in 1958. Many of his works were inspired by aspects of Black life he witnessed — including “Blues Suite” (1958), based on honky-tonk bars he frequented, and Ailey’s signature work, “Revelations” (1960), which uses the imagery and music of Black churches. The troupe toured constantly, breaking down barriers for having a multi-ethnic corps of dancers, and becoming global ambassadors.

Wignot interviews a host of Ailey’s former dancers, choreographers and colleagues, and relies on a wealth of archival interviews with Ailey — essentially allowing the man himself to narrate his story.

Not only did Wignot get access to the company’s archives, she also brings her camera into its rehearsal space, following the troupe in the act of creation. What’s being created is a 60-minute piece to Ailey, being developed by choreographer Rennie Harris, to celebrate the company’s 60th anniversary.

These rehearsal scenes serve as the backbone for Wignot’s telling of Ailey’s remarkable story — and are a reminder that Ailey’s work, like that of any artist worth discussing, is living a full life after the artist is gone.

Sundance review: 'On the Count of Three' channels the explosive mix of actor Christopher Abbott and director/star Jerrod Carmichael

‘On the Count of Three’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Sunday, January 31. Running time: 84 minutes.

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Director-actor Jerrod Carmichael’s high-wire act of a movie “On the Count of Three” is a breathtaking example of what might be a new genre: The action buddy dramedy.

Carmichael plays Val, who reacts to his boss’ offer of a promotion at the garden-supply business by trying to hang himself in the men’s room with his own belt. When that fails, Val goes to see his best friend, Kevin (Christopher Abbott), a live-wire who’s in a psych ward after trying to swallow a bottle of pills three days earlier.

Val helps Kevin escape the psych ward, and they drive off with a plan to shoot each other dead behind a strip club. In the moment, though, Kevin says he wants to have one last free day to do all the things they never had a chance to do — and then kill themselves.

What follows is a breakneck story, written by Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch, in which all the demons of Val’s and Kevin’s past get confronted one last time. This involves encounters with Tiffany Haddish, J.B. Smoove and Henry Winkler, all taking on roles defiantly outside their typecasting.

Carmichael, as a director, takes on the bumpy terrain of his difficult subject matter — suicide, racism, domestic violence, sexual abuse — by speeding right over them, making the audience feel every jolt along the way. Somehow it works, because Carmichael refuses to let them be minimized or swept under the rug.

What carries “On the Count of Three” are the paired performances of Carmichael and Abbott. Carmichael, best known for his sitcom “The Carmichael Show” and his Netflix standup specials, is the chill half of the duo, though his rage and regrets surface at the appropriate times. Abbott, a prolific character actor recently seen in “Possessor” and “Black Bear,” erupts with frenetic energy that perfectly corresponds to Carmichael’s cool. Together, they’re a volatile mix that propels this tough but engrossing film like a rocket.

Sundance review: 'John and the Hole' is the pretentious 'Home Alone' knock-off you never knew could be made

‘John and the Hole’

★★

Appearing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Sunday, January 31. Running time: 98 minutes.

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A teen-ager’s white privilege runs amok in “John and the Hole,” a maddeningly obtuse psychological thriller centered on a family terrorized by a demon seed.

John (Charlie Shotwell) is a quiet 13-year-old rich kid, living with his parents, Brad and Anna (Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Ehle), and older sister, Laurie (Taissa Farmiga), in a big, modern house in the Massachusetts woods. He practices tennis, to prepare for an upcoming qualification tourney, and can play the piano.

What, then, to explain why he gives the family gardener (Lucien Spelman) a glass of lemonade laced with a knockout drug? That turns out to be a dry run for his big plan: To move his parents and sister, while sleeping off their Mickey Finn, into a deep hole left behind on their property by previous occupants who started constructing a bunker.

The family wakes up asking the same question the audience is left pondering for the next hour or so: Why is John doing this?

Director Pascual Sisto, making his feature debut, and screenwriter Nicolás Giacobone — who co-wrote two Alejandro Iñárritu films, “Biutiful” and “Birdman” — never make an attempt to answer the big “why?” of the story (which is adapted from Giacobone’s short story), much to the audience’s frustration. Instead, they show us the would-be comic moments of John trying to keep up the pretense to Anna’s tennis partner (Tamara Hickey) and John’s video-game rival (Ben O’Brien) that everything’s fine.

Equally aggravating is a framing story, with another mom (Georgia Lyman) and a daughter (Samantha LeBretton), that’s wedged in with no explanation or payoff. And then there’s the ending, which is where that white privilege hits its zenith.

If you can imagine “Home Alone” remade as a pretentious art-house movie where Macaulay Culkin is playing both Kevin and the Wet Bandits simultaneously. you get a sense of what’s happening in “John and the Hole.” Meanwhile, some talented actors are left in a hole, more confused than the audience.

Sundance review: 'I Was a Simple Man' is a beautifully rendered story of a dying man facing the ghosts and regrets of his past

‘I Was a Simple Man’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Sunday, January 31. Running time: 100 minutes.

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Beautiful and elegiac, writer-director Christopher Makoto Yogi’s “I Was a Simple Man” is a profoundly moving ghost story about a man reflecting on his regrets as he prepares for the end of his life.

Steve Iwamoto, in only his second screen appearance, gives an elegantly spare performance as Masao Matsuyoshi, a Japanese-American living in Hawai’i. He’s an old man, facing down some unnamed illness that will likely kill him sooner rather than later. He lives alone, sometimes helping his perpetually unemployed son, Mark (Nelson Lee), who says he talks to the family’s ghosts.

Masao has two other children: Henry, who lives on the mainland and is only present as an annoyed voice on the phone; and Kati (Chanel Akiko Hirai), who lives in town, on the other side of the island, and visits occasionally and reluctantly — leaving Masao’s care, toward the end, to his grandson, Gavin (Kanoa Goo).

In an important way, though, Masao is not alone. He’s visited by the ghost of his wife, Grace (played by “Crazy Rich Asians” star Constance Wu). Grace has been gone some 60 years — she died on the day in 1959 when Hawai’i became the 50th state — and most of Masao’s regrets stem from what happened after Grace died.

Yogi shows us those days in flashback, with Tim Chiou playing Masao in 1959, and Kyle Kosaki playing him in 1941, opposite Boonyanudh Jiyarom as a young Grace. Past and present collide frequently in Yogi’s telling, one informing the other to paint a full picture of Masao’s life.

It takes a few minutes for a viewer to recalibrate their bearings to Yogi’s thoughtful, deliberate pacing. “Time moves differently out here,” Gavin remarks late in the film, long after the viewer has reached that conclusion. Within those slower rhythms, though, Yogi lets us appreciate the beauty of Hawai’i and the literally haunted mood it casts over Masao’s final days and his eventual peace.

Sundance review: 'Homeroom' shows us high school life through COVID-19 and a social-justice movement, and how the students may have the answers we need

‘Homeroom’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Sunday, January 31. Running time: 90 minutes.

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The kids aren’t alright, but they may know more than the adults in “Homeroom,” a thoughtful and emotionally absorbing verité documentary inside an Oakland high school.

The student body of Oakland High School is about a third Black, a third Latino, and a third Haitian refugees, with only a handful of white kids. Director Peter Nicks takes his cameras into classrooms and after-school activities, capturing everything from rehearsals for a fall talent showcase to the meetings of the student government.

It’s in the student government area that Nicks finds the richest part of his narrative. He finds Denilson Garibo, a quietly intense boy who’s one of the two student representatives on the Oakland School District’s school board. In the fall, Garibo leads an effort to get the board to disband its in-house police force — which many Black and brown students see as intimidating, and a money drain that could be funding better education. When the effort fails in the fall, Garibo bravely dresses down the adults on the board, calling on the pain of his own experiences.

The film’s narrative takes a sharp turn out of necessity, when the COVID-19 pandemic forces California schools to close and switch to online learning. Between the pandemic and the protests that follow the death of George Floyd in Minnesota, the students get a different kind of education — and teach the grown-ups a few things, too.

With “Homeroom,” Nicks completes a trilogy of deeply embedded looks at Oakland institutions, following 2012’s “The Waiting Room,” which was set in a hospital, and 2017’s “The Force,” which went inside the Oakland Police Department. Here, as with those films, he lets his subjects do the talking, and provides enough room for their stories to play out naturally and eloquently.

Sundance review: Ahmir 'Questlove' Thompson's 'Summer of Soul' is a vital lesson in Black history that you can dance to

“Summer of Soul (… Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

★★★★

Appearing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Saturday, January 30. Running time: 117 minutes.

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With a historian’s eye, a musician’s ear and an activist’s heart, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson has fashioned an important document of a vital era with “Summer of Soul (… Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).”

It’s also a great music to dance in the aisles on the way to demanding social change that’s been denied long before 1969, when this amazing story takes place.

Here’s the scene: It’s Harlem, in the summer of 1969, in the weeks before the music festival known as Woodstock made headlines upstate a hundred miles. The Harlem Culture Festival took place over six weekends, with concerts in Mt. Morris Park in Harlem — with a line-up of some of the best talent Black America had to offer.

Much of it was filmed for posterity — and that footage sat untouched in a basement, until Thompson started working on this movie.

It’s an embarrassment of riches that Thompson has to work with, and like the bandleader he is (of The Roots), he starts by assembling a dream playlist. Start with Stevie Wonder, then move on to some of the old reliables, like B.B. King and Herbie Mann, and slide into some of the young hitmakers of the day, like The 5th Dimension and Gladys Knight & The Pips. Include a healthy dose of gospel, topped by the legend Mahalia Jackson handing off to a young Mavis Staples. Move into some Motown, and then Sly and the Family Stone. Don’t forget some Puerto Rican and Afro-Cuban acts, a song by South Africa’s Hugh Masekela, and then give the stage to Nina Simone. Finish with encores by Wonder and Sly.

If all Thompson did was play the hits, that would be enough. But Thompson adds interviews from participants and attendees that bring the moments alive — commenting on what it felt like to be there, and even smelled like (“chicken and Afro Sheen,” as one concertgoer put it). The interviews also set the context for the shows, just over a year after Marrtin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, as America sent a disproportionate number of Black men to Vietnam while flying two white military pilots to the moon.

There are some gems in the new interview footage — like seeing Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. watching themselves in The 5th Dimension, or Lin-Manuel Miranda and his father, Luis, explaining the crossover of Latin and Caribbean sounds into soul and R&B. And the historical side never overwhelms the musical side, but also never feels like an afterthought.

By blending the history with the music so gracefully, Thompson has created a document of a 1969 event that feels as alive as if it happened last year. Put “Summer of Soul” on a double-bill with “Woodstock,” and see which one is the nostalgia trip and which one is relevant to what’s happening now.

Sundance review: 'CODA' is a warm-hearted comedy-drama about family bonds, with a powerful performance by 18-year-old Emilia Jones

‘CODA’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Saturday, January 30. Running time: 114 minutes.

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Family is a stronger force than music or deafness in “CODA,” a charming comedy-drama about a teen girl caught in a classic tug-of-war between familial obligation and chasing her dreams.

Emilia Jones gives a star-making performance as Ruby Rossi, the only hearing member of a fishing family in Gloucester, Mass. Both her parents, Frank (Troy Kotsur) and Jackie (Marlee Matlin), and her older brother, Leo (Daniel Durant) are deaf. (The title is an acronym for “child of deaf adults.”) Ruby works on the family’s fishing boat — and, being the only one who can hear, works the radio and negotiates with the fish wholesalers on the dock.

Ruby has a passion, one that she can’t really share with her family: Music. When it comes time to pick a school activity, she sees that a cute boy, Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, from “Sing Street”), signs up for choir, she does the same. She discovers that she’s actually a good singer — so much so that her choir teacher, Mr. V (Eugenio Derbez), suggests she audition for the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Mom takes Ruby’s love of singing personally. “If I was blind, you would like to paint.” Surely, Ruby loves her family, but the relationship is a complex one — she’s heard her classmates mock her family, and has felt the pressure of being the family’s in-house interpreter. 

Writer-director Siân Heder (who has written for “Orange Is the New Black,” and whose directing debut “Tallulah” premiered at Sundance in 2016) remakes a 2014 French comedy, “La Family Bélier,” into a warmly funny and quite touching story. The comedy sometimes gets a bit raunchy — Frank and Jackie have a boisterous sex life, and Frank’s command of dirty sign language is impressive — and the tender moments are undercut with the right amount of humor. Two of the best moments occur when Ruby is onstage singing, and only a stony heart would sniff back a tear or two.

In a strong cast — Kotsur and Durant are delightful, and Matlin hasn’t had a chance to be this good in years — 18-year-old Emilia Jones is hands down the star here. She captures Ruby’s love for music and for her family, even when the burden of being its only hearing member grows wearying. “CODA” will go down as the first of many triumphs for this talented actress.

Sundance review: 'In the Same Breath' is a searing look at how China applied propaganda to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic

‘In the Same Breath’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the Premieres section of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Saturday, January 30. Running time: 95 minutes; in English, and in Chinese with subtitles.

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Even moviegoers experiencing “COVID fatigue” will be awakened to anger by director Nanfu Wang’s “In the Same Breath,” a chilling and necessary look at how the Chinese government buried its botched response to the coronavirus under a mountain of propaganda.

Wang grew up in a city just 200 miles away from Wuhan, the bustling city where the virus was first discovered. So, for her, this is personal — and she makes a shattering personal film, in which she dissects the patterns of China’s propaganda, patterns she knows well when researching her 2019 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner “One Child Nation.”

Through screen grabs from Chinese social media, posts deleted almost as soon as they were put up, Wang shows the on-the-ground reality of the virus’ spread that the government’s optimistic news reports and lofty rhetoric tried to hide. She also has video, shot by local videographers she knew back home, showing the crowded conditions in Chinese hospitals — a preview of what Americans’ would see just a couple of months later.

As disturbing as it is to have one’s future predicted like that, what’s more troubling is Wang’s observation that the early pronouncements from the Trump administration matched the Chinese model — underplay the spread, ignore the data, and threaten anyone who says things are as bad as they are — just two months later. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, considered the lone voice of truth among Trump’s coronavirus experts, is shown here trying to reassure Americans back in March that they didn’t need to use face masks.

Wang carefully, yet forcefully, presents the evidence of the costs of inaction against the virus — while also arguing that authoritarian tendencies, seen from China’s Communist Party and from Trump’s rhetoric, can be an even more insidious killer than COVID-19.

The day before: Catch up on some advance reading before the 2021 Sundance Film Festival starts

The 2021 Sundance Film Festival launches, on a digital platform rather than among the snowy mountains around Park City, on Thursday.

Before it starts, though, please look through these stories I wrote in preparation for the festival:

• Would Sundance ever leave Park City? Some folks in the Utah ski town wonder if this year’s festival — online most everywhere, with a few “satellite screens” around the country — might get Sundance thinking in that direction. Here’s my article about the likelihood of that happening.

• How is Park City’s economy going to fare without Sundance coming to visit? I talked to businesses and nonprofits about how they’re coping. (Along with that: A timeline of the intertwined histories of Sundance and Park City.)

• The COVID-19 pandemic prompted Sundance to change how it presents this year’s films — and it seeped into some of the films themselves.

• So, in the words of David Byrne, how do I work this? Some tips for navigating the digital Sundance.

• What should you watch? Here are 10 titles that look promising.

• And, if you missed them, here are the announcements of the festival’s non-movie programming, and the members of the festival’s juries.

Scene one, take one: Getting ready for Sundance 2021

The 2021 Sundance Film Festival will be like no other.

For starters, none of it will happen in the physical space of Park City, Utah — the festival’s home location since the early 1980s (and, in fact, before the Sundance Institute took over the event in 1985).

In early December, the festival’s new director, Tabitha Jackson, laid out the general plan for the mostly online festival. All the feature films and shorts, as well as New Frontier offerings and live Q&As, will be shown online.

At the time, Jackson held out hope that some events could be held in person, at The Ray in Park City — as well as at more than 30 “satellite screen” partners across the country, including drive-in shows in Los Angeles.

On Dec. 30, though, Sundance announced the plans for The Ray were canceled, because of the continued threat of COVID-19. Some cities may still get to do satellite programs, but that’s on a case-by-case basis, depending on health and safety conditions in those cities.

The slate of 72 films — well, 71 now, after a cancellation — looks fascinating, and shows that even when everything else is different about Sundance, the quality of the movies should remain the same.

(While you’re poking around, look at the slate that Sundance’s kid brother, the Slamdance Film Festival, is planning to show. Slamdance also is abandoning the physical space of Park City this year, going online only.)