Sundance review: 'The Blazing World' is an arresting trip through a new kind of Wonderland, and a strong directing debut for actress Carlson Young

‘The Blazing World’

★★★

Appearing in the Next section of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Tuesday, February 2. Running time: 99 minutes.

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Actor-turned-director Carlson Young takes viewers on a trip through her own kind of Oz in “The Blazing World,” a visually striking examination of the thin line between life and death.

Young, best known for her stint on MTV’s “Scream: The TV Series,” plays Margaret, a young woman who is haunted by the death of her twin sister, Elizabeth, when they were little, when their parents (Dermot Mulroney and Vinessa Shaw) were fighting.

Now, Margaret is depressed and suicidal, feeling the unseen menace of a mysterious figure, played by the German actor Udo Kier, which would be enough to scare the crap out of anyone. When Margaret sees the man again, he’s standing by a portal — the same portal young Margaret saw him take Elizabeth through after her death. Margaret jumps in, which is where the creepy adventure really starts.

Young and co-writer Pierce Brown adapt the classic tropes of the young woman caught in fantasy land — one can feel the threads of Alice, Dorothy and Coraline woven through the narrative — as Margaret begins a quest to unlock the answers to Elizabeth’s death. Of course, the road runs through Margaret’s past, and surreal encounters with her parents and the roots of her depression.

Young creates some arresting images of the warped unreality Margaret traverses. She also makes the most out of limited resources; she filmed during the pandemic, creating a “bubble” for cast and crew in a resort in her home state of Texas. (One of her executive producers is Elizabeth Avellan, the producer behind Robert Rodriguez’ films.)

“The Blazing World” is a strong introduction to Young both as a dynamic filmmaker and as an actor who push beyond “scream queen” roles. It’s a movie that makes a viewer wonder where Young will go next.

Sundance review: 'Jockey' is a beautiful, authentic drama of a horse racer's life, with a heartfelt performance by Clifton Collins Jr.

‘Jockey’

★★★★

Appearing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Tuesday, February 2. Running time: 95 minutes.

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There is beauty and pain at the heart of “Jockey,” director Clint Bentley poetic and spartan study of a man realizing he’s near the end of his ride.

Jackson Silva, played by the veteran character Clifton Collins Jr., is a jockey who’s worked the circuit of thoroughbred racing for decades, and has the scars and mended bones to show for it. He mostly works with one trainer, Ruth (Molly Parker), usually riding the horses she trains for other owners.

This season, at Phoenix’s Turf Paradise (where the film was shot), Ruth has her own horse, a filly Ruth bought as a yearling when other owners passed her over. Ruth sees something in this horse, named Dido’s Lament, and Jackson sees it, too. They make a deal that Jackson will ride Dido’s Lament, provided he bring his weight down.

Jackson’s pursuit of a late-career championship hits some snags. There’s a health issue that he tries to ignore, until he can’t. One of his best friends, Leo (Logan Cormier), takes a spill in a race, and lands in the hospital. And a young jockey, Gabriel (Moises Arias), arrives at the track to declare that Jackson is the kid’s father.

Within this simple story, Bentley and his writing partner Greg Kwedar explore the rough-and-tumble life of a jockey. Bentley, whose father was a jockey, goes into the locker rooms and onto the track with real-life jockeys, capturing the racetrack life with more authenticity than most horse-related movies ever get. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso shoots most of the film at “magic hour,” those times near sunrise and sunset when the light is just perfect — a visual match for the twilight of Jackson’s career.

Parker and Arias are powerful in their supporting roles. But the movie belongs, first and foremost, to Collins, who has earned his spot in the saddle after a long career as a supporting player that runs  from “Traffic” to “Westworld.” Collins embodies the bone-weary struggles of an aging athlete, when there’s more track behind him than in front, in a performance that is spare and graceful.

There’s an amazing moment where Bentley and Collins crystalize the thrill and peril of the racer’s life. There’s a race midway through the film, which Bentley shows us only as a single long take, the camera close up on Jackson’s face, from the starting gate to the finish line. Everything we need to know is conveyed in that scene, and it’s an indicator of what a mature, beautiful film “Jockey” is.

Sundance review: In 'Land,' Robin Wright shows as much talent behind the camera as in front of it

‘Land’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the Premieres section of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Tuesday, February 2. Running time: 89 minutes.

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For “Land,” her first feature as a director, Robin Wright displays all the qualities she has as an actor: Elegance, natural beauty and a core of strength beneath a delicate surface.

Wright plays Edee, a woman who has suffered something — what that something is remains unexpressed for much of the film — and is looking to get away from other people. She buys a cabin deep in the Wyoming Rockies (the shoot was actually in Alberta), and holes up with a lot of canned food and some manuals on how to survive in the woods.

Working off a spare script, by Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam, Wright shows Edee’s gradual evolution as she figures out how to live alone. After one event that leaves Edee starving and freezing, she gets an assist from a hunter, Miguel (Demián Bichir), who shows her skills that can’t be learned from a book. A friendship develops, though both recognize the other is in pain and are careful not to pry into each other’s pasts.

Wright and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski capture the austere, unforgiving beauty in which Edee has surrounded herself. And, with an assist from editors Anne McCabe and Mikkel E.G. Nielsen, Wright unfolds the depths of Edee’s grief and Miguel’s regrets in subtle strokes, creating a shattering effect when the whole picture becomes clear. Wright is also a fair arbiter of her own performance, which is as powerful as it is understated.

Sundance review: 'Mayday' is an imaginative revenge fantasy, of a young woman going to war in an alternative reality

‘Mayday’

★★★

Appearing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Tuesday, February 2. Running time: 100 minutes.

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Bringing real guns to the battle of the sexes, writer-director Karen Cinorre’s “Mayday” is an engrossing psychological drama propelled by dream logic in an alternative reality.

In this reality, or something close to it, Anna (played with grit by Grace Van Patten) is a waitress at a wedding venue, living in her car and buffeted by the abuse of her boss (Frano Maskovic), who sexually assaults her in the walk-in freezer. Anna, at the end of her rope, decides to end it all by crawling into a gas oven.

She ends up crawling out the other end and falling into the ocean. She’s found on the rocky coast by Marsha (Mia Goth), who commands a group of young women in a never-ending war. Marsha and her squad — tough-talking Gert (played by the French singer Soko) and the sensitive Bea (played by model Havana Rose Liu) — operate out of a derelict U-boat, luring ships full of men into storms, like the sirens of mythology.

Marsha sees in Anna the potential to become a dead-eye sharpshooter. Anna trains hard, learning to swim and shoot and kill. But, as she descends into this ceaseless war, Anna begins to discover that Marsha’s motives aren’t necessarily pure.

Cinorre takes this surreal story into a lot of directions, crossing from war picture to revenge fantasy, with a musical dream sequence thrown in because, well, why not? Not everything here works, but even the less-successful moments have some bite.

Watching “Mayday,” I kept thinking that this is what Zack Snyder’s “Sucker Punch” might have been if directed by an imaginative woman and not a slavering guy with a “Sailor Moon” fixation. I also kept hoping that Cinorre has more where this came from.

Sundance review: 'Together Together' is a quietly wry comedy about a surrogate pregnancy, examining friendship as a transaction

‘Together Together’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Tuesday, February 2. Running time: 90 minutes.

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Writer-director Nikole Beckwith fashions a new genre — the platonic romantic comedy — in “Together Together,” a wry comedy about the transactional nature of relationships.

The relationship at the center of this film is literally transactional: Matt (Ed Helms), a successful middle-aged app designer, hires Anna (Patti Harrison), a 26-year-old barista, to be the gestational surrogate to carry his baby. The $15,000 fee, Anna believes, will allow her to finish the college degree that was derailed when she got pregnant as a teen (she put the baby up for adoption).

Anna aims to live her life as normally as possible, given that her belly is gradually swelling. But Matt can’t help but micromanage, concerned that she eats properly and so on. When Matt tries to surprise Anna at her apartment, and sees a guy leaving, an argument ensues about whether sex during pregnancy is safe. “You know the baby is not in my vagina, right?” Anna asks Matt, as these two people realize they’re thrown together in an incredibly intimate relationship with an expiration date.

Beckwith (“Stockholm, Pennsylvania,” SFF ’15) creates some quietly funny scenes between Helms and Harrison, as they navigate Matt’s involvement in the pregnancy and how close Anna allows herself to get to Matt. The movie’s final shot is a heartbreaker.

Helms is in his wheelhouse as Matt, the nerdy 40-something trying to rein in his enthusiasm and failing. For people who aren’t fans of Harrison’s work in “Shrill” or “Big Mouth” (where she’s a staff writer), this performance is eye-opening, as she navigates the emotional and physical changes of this pregnant pause in Anna’s life.

Sundance review: 'At the Ready' is an absorbing look inside a Texas high school's training of future law enforcement officers

‘At the Ready’

★★★

Appearing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Tuesday, February 2. Running time: 96 minutes.

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Teenagers learn serious life lessons, and how to take down a bad guy, in “At the Ready,” an absorbing documentary about the complexities of life along the U.S./Mexico border.

Welcome to Horizon High School in El Paso, Texas, where students learn the skills to become law-enforcement officers in the school’s Criminal Justice program. They’re good skills to have in a city 10 miles from the border, across from Ciudad Juarez, where the FBI, DEA and Border Patrol all have offices.

Director Maisie Crow primarily follows three students. Cristina is a recent graduate of Horizon, trying to land a job with the Border Patrol. Cesar aims to find a career that will feed his mom and kid brother, since his father is in prison on a drug-trafficking offense. And Mason aims to show he has leadership abilities, while also discovering truths about his sexual identity. (Mason came out as a transgender man after filming ended.)

Crow gets her cameras into the students’ classes and homes, and into a competition held among similar programs at Texas high schools. “At the Ready” shows that opinions about the law, police and immigration aren’t cut and dried along the border, and the conversations make for an intriguing movie.

Sundance review: Documentary on Rita Moreno shines brightest when the legend herself does the talking

‘Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It’

★★★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: 96 minutes.

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A filmmaker would have to go out of their way to botch a documentary about someone as lively, and with a long and storied career, as Rita Moreno.

Thankfully, director Mariem Pérez Riera does a beautiful job of profiling the 89-year-old Hollywood legend and survivor, mostly by letting Moreno herself do the majority of the talking.

Moreno is game to talk about a lot of her life: Her childhood in Puerto Rico during the Depression, moving with her mother to New York when she was 5, becoming a performer, dressing up like Elizabeth Taylor to impress Louis B. Mayer and get her first studio contract. And that’s just the beginning.

Moreno talks candidly about being typecast in “native girl” roles, wearing “makeup the color of mud” to play Pacific Islanders, Native Americans and, in “The King and I,” a Thai maiden. She also talks about the leering, harassment and abuse at the hands of the men who ran Hollywood, including being raped by her own agent.

Through all the bad material, there were some gems: Roles in ‘Singin’ in the Rain” (as the flashy flapper Zelda) and her Oscar-winning performance in Anita in “West Side Story.” Pérez Riera interviews scholars and many famous names — including Eva Longoria, Gloria Estefan and Lin-Manuel Miranda — to dissect the cultural significance of Anita, and Moreno’s surprise Oscar win for the role. 

Moreno also talks candidly about her tempestuous relationship with Marlon Brando, and several tragedies that accompanied it. And she talks about how, after her Oscar win, she turned down the “native girl” roles and ended up not making another movie for seven years. Instead, she went to Broadway, winning a Tony for Terrence McNally’s “The Ritz.” She also worked on the children’s TV series “The Electric Company” (the album for which got her a Grammy), and a classic appearance on “The Muppet Show,” for which she won her first Emmy — completing her EGOT trophy case.

Moreno has never stopped working, though it seems like every 20 years, she lands a “comeback” role — as a nun counseling inmates on “Oz” in the ‘90s, and most recently as the flamboyant grandma on the reboot of “One Day at a Time.”

Pérez Riera (whose son played the teen grandson on “One Day at a Time”) assembles a raft of movie clips and archival footage, as well as interviews with friends, colleagues and historians who put the work into context. But the strength of the film is Moreno herself, who in her 80s is still the attention seeker and truth teller she says she’s been since she was a little girl.

Sundance review: 'Superior' is a sharp thriller, bolstered by a fascinating turn by twins Alessandra and Ani Mesa

‘Superior’

★★★

Appearing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Monday, February 1. Running time: 97 minutes.

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Buoyed by riveting performances by twin sisters Alessandra and Ani Mesa, director Erin Vassilopoulos’s feature debut “Superior” is a smart little thriller about identity and wildly divergent lives.

Marian (played by Alessandra Mesa, who co-wrote the script with Vassilopoulos) and Vivian (Ani Mesa) are twin sisters, but the physical similarity is about all they have in common. Marian is a rock musician, on the run from her boyfriend (Pico Alexander), looking for a place to crash. She calls up Vivian, a homemaker whose marriage to the boring Michael (Jake Hoffman) seems to hinge on whether they can conceive a child.

Vassilopoulos mines some comedy out of Marian’s efforts to blend in to her new suburban setting, whether it’s joining Vivian for a water aerobics class or getting a job at an ice-cream shop run by a stoner, Miles (Stanley Simons). Then Marian suggests she and Vivian switch places for a day, and Vivian is surprisingly game to break out of her humdrum existence. Eventually, you know Marian’s boyfriend is going to show up — and all bets are off as to what happens next.

Vassilopoulos has a keen sense of pacing, switching from the comedic to the frightening with expert timing. Her not-so-secret weapon, though, are the Mesa sisters, who explore both sides of the twins’ relationship and the shifting viewpoints of their different but entwined personalities.

Sundance review: 'Passing' is a beautifully realized story of race, classically told and passionately modern

‘Passing’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Monday, February 1. Running time: 98 minutes.

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Actor Rebecca Hall’s directing debut “Passing” is a delicate but powerful masterpiece of form and performance, telling a decades-old story of race and discrimination that’s as fresh as today’s news.

Based on Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, which Hall’s screenplay adapts with painstaking care, the story begins when Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson), a Harlem woman who can but seldom does pass for white, has a chance encounter with a former acquaintance, Claire Kendry (Ruth Negga). Claire is also light-skinned Black, but is living as a white woman, married to a prosperous businessman, John (Alexander Skarsgård), who is an unabashed bigot.

Claire becomes a regular visitor to Irene’s home in Harlem, which she shares with her doctor husband, Bryan (André Holland), and their two boys, who are all darker skinned than Irene. Claire, her flask always filled (this is the age of Prohibition, after all), also insinuates herself into Irene’s social circle; Irene organizes fund-raising dances for the Negro Welfare League, and is good friends with a white author, Hugh Wentworth (Bill Camp), who is sympathetic to the cause of civil rights — though not above commenting on Claire’s free-wheeling behavior.

Claire’s presence, and absence, also stirs up disagreements in the Redfield marriage — particularly as Bryan presses Irene to leave America for some place with less overt discrimination.

Hall and cinematographer Edu Grau filmed “Passing” in black and white, in a strict 4-by-3 screen ratio, which matches the 1920s setting — the era of Al Jolson doing blackface, mind you — and concentrates the eye on the expressive, radiant faces of Thompson and Negga. The period look, realized by production designer Nora Mendis and costume designer Marci Rodgers and their teams, is exquisite.

Hall puts much care and detail into every shot, but her biggest coup is pairing Thompson and Negga, who embody the two sides of the racial divide and the psychological push-and-pull that both bonds and separates the characters. These talented women — the two in front of the camera, and the one  behind it — make “Passing” a sparkling gem with some surprisingly sharp edges.

Sundance review: 'Try Harder!' celebrates the teens at one of America's top high schools, while raising questions about the stress of the college-admissions process.

‘Try Harder!’

★★★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: 84 minutes.

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Director Debbie Lum strikes a careful balance in her documentary “Try Harder!” — to celebrate the high-achieving students in one of America’s competitive high schools, while raising thorny questions about the competing that happens there.

Lowell High School in San Francisco is one of the most selective schools in the country, designed to teach STEM to the city’s best students and getting them into the best colleges. Importantly, the majority of students there are Asian Americans, often children of first-generation immigrants who, as the movie shows, fulfill the stereotype of the “tiger mom.”

Lum concentrates mostly on five teens, achieving a cross-section of the student body. Three of them are Asian American, one is white, and one is the daughter of a Black woman and a long-absent white father. Through them, the movie talks about the issues of race in the college-admission game — how some schools view Asian students as robotic test-taking machines, or how the biracial girl, Rachael, hears casually racist comments from her rival classmates.

Lum’s film also makes a strong argument that a school like Lowell, by being so laser-focused on college admissions, denies their kids the thing some colleges want most: A well-rounded life. There are a lot of extracurricular activities shown in the film — one boy, Alvan, discovers he enjoys dance class, while Rachael edits the school newspaper — but it’s forcefully implied that those are second-string behind the STEM work.

“Try Harder!” delves into these issues, but keeps the focus on the students, who are far more than the sum total of their application essays or the number of Ivy League schools that rejected them. Leaving the film, you can’t help but hope they learn more at college than the coursework.