Sundance review: 'Blood' is a meandering misfire, beautifully rendered but with no particular place to go

Pleasant but meandering, writer-director Bradley Rust Gray’s “Blood” shows there’s a thin line between a movie that’s meditative and a movie that stubbornly refuses to get to the point.

On paper, the premise is fairly straightforward: Chloe (played by the great Swiss-born actress Carla Juri) is a photographer in Japan on an assignment, apparently for a food publication. She’s also recently widowed, and the film frequently flashes to better days she had with her husband, Peter (Gustav Skarsgård, another son of Stellan).

When Chloe isn’t soaking up Tokyo food culture, or taking dance classes from a Japanese friend, she hangs out with a musician, Toshi (played by the musician Takashi Ueno), who has been friends with Chloe and Peter for years. Toshi has a little girl, Futaba (played by Futaba Okazaki), with Down syndrome, and Chloe dotes on her nearly as much as Toshi does.

About midway through this nearly two-hour film, Toshi asks the question the audience has been waiting to hear: “What do you think about going on a date?”

The question is intended to nudge Chloe into some sort of decision, to reflect on whether she has healed enough after Peter’s death to think about finding love again. It’s a simple dramatic premise, something any Hallmark Channel hack could unravel in short order.

Gray — who makes movies with his wife, So Yong Kim (who directed Gray’s scripts for “Lovesong” and “In Between Days,” both past Sundance entries) — is after something else, though it’s difficult to divine exactly what. Some scenes have Chloe conversing with an older friend (Issei Ogata, from Martin Scorsese’s “Silence”) about loneliness. Others have Chloe in a dance class run by another friend (Cheiko Ito), a choreographer fascinated with mirrors as a metaphor for the pull of one’s soulmate.

These are some nice ideas, but Gray is in no great hurry to go anywhere with them. He’s content to have these characters explore Tokyo, which is beautifully rendered by cinematographer Eric Lin (“Hearts Beat Loud”). Where Chloe could have catharsis, instead we get stasis — but it’s a pretty limbo, populated by characters you hope eventually will figure it out.

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‘Blood’

★★1/2

Premiered Monday, January 24, in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Wednesday, January 26, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, but probably R for one sex scene. Running time: 112 minutes; in English, and Japanese with subtitles.

Sundance review: 'The Mission' goes inside the Latter-day Saint missionary experience, showing young people facing the challenges of two years away from home.

I have seen a lot of movies made by and about members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — dramas, comedies, documentaries, you name it — and I can say that director Tania Anderson’s “The Mission” is one of the most thorough and thoughtful depictions of Latter-day Saint life ever put on screen.

Anderson is an outsider — neither raised in the church nor converted to it — so she comes in to the subject fairly fresh, with a minimum of preconceptions, and with a generous curiosity for what these teens are experiencing on their spiritual adventure.

The film follows four teens — three from Utah, one from Idaho — through their two-year missions to Finland (where Anderson lives). The film starts with the foursome in their homes, preparing for their departures. Then it’s off to the Missionary Training Center in Provo, for some whirlwind lessons in Finnish, which the teens discover is a pretty difficult language — for example, as a teacher warns, the words for “meet” and “kill” should very similar, so they must be careful not to confuse them.

Then it’s off to Finland, where the elders and sisters get assigned to their mission companions and their towns. There’s some doorbelling, and standing out in public squares trying to greet passersby — but there are also service projects, like cleaning houses for the elderly.

Anderson shows that finding converts is part of the job of these missionaries, the true spiritual work is within — as the elders and sisters learn to be better people, making friends with their companions and learning to listen to those who don’t agree with their church.

Not that there aren’t moments of humor, when the teens are just being themselves. One of my favorites involves Sister McKenna Field, an earnest young woman from St. George, who notes that older people in Finland like a particularly awful flavor of ice cream — and how accepting it from them becomes a test of politeness.

What makes “The Mission” so compelling is that Anderson doesn’t take sides — this is neither a screed against religious neo-colonialism, as the church’s detractors may put it, or a church-produced film about how wonderful missionary work is. Anderson’s approach is anthropological, more interested in depicting these young people as just people.

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‘The Mission’

★★★1/2

Premiered Monday, January 24, in the World Cinema Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Wednesday, January 26, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, but probably PG for mild language and mature themes. Running time: 95 minutes.

Sundance review: Documentary 'I Didn't See You There' uses explosions of texture to show the view from wheelchair level

The title of director Reid Davenport’s “I Didn’t See You There” is supposed to represent what people probably say to him as they look past him while he ambulates in his wheelchair — but, as this eye-opening documentary progresses, I think it exemplifies Davenport’s attitude that he’s going to zip through life at high speed, taking in everything he can, and it’s up to everyone else to either enjoy the ride or get the hell out of the way.

Davenport is his own cinematographer for most of the film, either holding the camera or mounting it on his wheelchair as he barrels down the sidewalks of Oakland, Calif., where he lives. He chose Oakland so he could be independent, in a city with continuous sidewalks, ample curb cuts and good public transit. (The film spends a lot of time on BART subways.)

One day, Davenport notices a circus tent erected across the street from his apartment building. As he circles the perimeter, Davenport reflects on the history of circuses, particularly the side shows where people with disabilities or non-conforming appearances were put on display as freaks. Davenport occasionally flies to his home town, Bethel, Conn. — the birthplace, as it happens, of showman P.T. Barnum, the co-founder of the Barnum & Bailey Circus and the guy who more than anyone popularized the “freak show.”

Hanging with Davenport, who keeps his camera running as he rolls through Oakland or hangs with his family in Bethel, we see the world from the level of his wheelchair. We experience the microaggressions he encounters, whether it’s a couple loading their car in the middle of a curb cut or a pile of those damn electric scooters blocking the sidewalk.

Sometimes, the camera is pointed straight ahead, so we can see the path ahead. Sometimes, it’s aimed at the sky. In some of the most fascinating footage, the camera is pointed toward the ground, and all of the different components of the path — the gray concrete, the black asphalt, the red bricks of fancier storefronts, the yellow bumps along the subway entrances — flash before your eyes. The swirl of color and texture, reminiscent of one of Stan Brakhage’s experimental films, illustrates a view of the world people out of wheelchairs might never notice.

Davenport doesn’t show himself on screen too much — he’s holding the camera, so if we see him, it’s probably in a reflection. What we do see, by entering his point of view, is a man frustrated at the obstacles in his life but determined and resilient to roll over them.

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‘I Didn’t See You There’

★★★★

Premiered Monday, January 24, in the U.S. Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Wednesday, January 26, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language. Running time: 77 minutes.

Sundance review: 'Free Chol Soo Lee' tells how a wrongful conviction of a Korean immigrant sparked a movement to fight injustice

In the documentary “Free Chol Soo Lee,” filmmakers Eugene Yi and Julie Ha examine how a movement among Asian Americans to battle injustice emerged from one man’s troubled life.

In 1973, Chol Soo Lee was a 20-year-old Korean immigrant living in San Francisco’s Chinatown, with a criminal record. After a man was shot dead in a Chinatown intersection, part of an ongoing gang war. Cops arrested Lee, and he was tried and convicted — based on the testimony of white tourists who later admitted they couldn’t distinguish Asian features — and given a life sentence in San Quentin.

Four years into his prison term, he was attacked by a member of a white gang, whom he killed in what his lawyers argued was self-defense. An all-white jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to the gas chamber in San Quentin.

While he was in prison, activists began to mount a campaign to free Lee, to expose the racism and shoddy detective work in the San Francisco Police Department. The campaign became a unifying event among Asian Americans in California and across the country. It helped that Lee was a charismatic interview subject, handsome and smiling as he discussed the wrong done to him by the system.

Yi and Ha have compiled a wealth of archival material, and fresh interviews with the people involved in the campaign — the most compelling being Ranko Yamada, a friend of Lee’s before his arrest, who went to law school and became a lawyer so she could be fight for Lee’s freedom and other cases of injustice.

Lee’s voice is heard in interviews, and in writings narrated by Sebastian Yoon. His words paint a portrait of a man who felt almost cursed in life, both before his arrest and through his imprisonment.

The film works because it finds the tricky balance between describing Lee’s hard life and exploring how his prison experience inspired a movement that was bigger than he was — and how he struggled to live up to those expectations.

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‘Free Chol Soo Lee’

★★★1/2

Premiered Friday, January 21, and screened again Sunday, January 23, in the U.S. Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. No further screenings are scheduled on the festival portal; it will screen in seven cities as part of the Satellite Screens program). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for descriptions and images of violence, and references to drug use and sexual assault. Running time: 86 minutes.

Sundance review: 'Alice' takes an antebellum slave drama and gives it a surprising, emotional twist

This is a (mostly) spoiler-free review her for writer-director Krystin Ver Linden’s debut feature, “Alice” — which is tricky, because how much one grooves to the movie depends on how one reacts to what happens at the 39-minute mark.

Ver Linden starts this “inspired by true events” drama with the title character, played by Keke Palmer, in a slave-quarters wedding to Joseph (Gaius Charles), on a Georgia plantation in an unnamed year sometime before the Civil War. The preacher recites their vows carefully: “… in sickness and in health, until distance do you part.” The clear message is that their choice to marry is severely limited by their circumstance as enslaved people.

The plantation owner, Paul Bennett (played by Jonny Lee Miller), treats the Black population on this plantation cruelly. In one moment, he whips Joseph savagely for a seemingly minor violation of the rules — and, later, when Joseph fights Bennett’s overseer, Aaron (Craig Stark), and then tries to escape, he’s brought back almost dead. That spurs Alice’s decision to try to make a break for freedom, too.

That gets us to that 39-minute mark. What happens after? I’ll say this much: Common appears as a major character, and the look of the final hour owes less to strict historical accuracy and more to blaxploitation movies and, specifically, Pam Grier.

I’ll also say that Ver Linden’s film packs a wallop, with intense visuals and a dynamic soundtrack (to which Common contributed). And I’ll say that Palmer gives a fierce and emotionally grounded performance as Alice, whose helplessness and fear transforms into rage and empowerment.

And that event at the 39-minute mark of “Alice”? People are going either love it or hate it. I loved it, and was impressed with Ver Linden’s talent for keeping audiences on their toes.

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‘Alice’

★★★1/2

Premiered Sunday, January 23, in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Tuesday, January 25, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. (It is slated to be released in North America on March 18.) Not rated, but probably R for strong violence, language and some sexual content. Running time: 100 minutes.

Sundance review: 'Cha Cha Real Smooth' is an earnest semi-romance that shows Cooper Raiff to be a charming triple-threat — writer, director and star

If writer-director-actor Cooper Raiff’s name wasn’t already in your mental list of up-and-coming filmmakers after his 2020 college comedy “Shithouse,” his new semi-romantic comedy “Cha Cha Real Smooth” should be your wake-up call to this guy’s extraordinary talent and big heart.

Raiff plays Andrew, 22, a recent college graduate who isn’t sure what to do next. He wants to go to Barcelona, where his college girlfriend Maya (Amara Pedroso) is studying on a Fulbright scholarship. Instead, he’s moved back home to New Jersey — living with his mom, Lisa (Leslie Mann), his 13-year-old brother David (Evan Assante), and mom’s gruff new husband, Greg (Brad Garrett) — and has a job selling hot dogs at the mall.

Since David is 13, he’s been invited to a lot of bar and bat mitzvahs this summer and fall. Andrew ends up at one, having drinks with college friend Macy (Odeya Rush), when he notices a beautiful woman sitting across the room. This is Domino (Dakota Johnson), who is sitting with her autistic daughter, Lola (Vanessa Burghardt), who is too nervous to join her classmates on the dance floor.

David urges Andrew to energize the boring bat mitzvah, and he’s got the natural charm and reckless energy to do it. He also manages to convince Lola to dance, which impresses Domino. By the end of the night, the other Jewish mothers are wanting to hire David to be a “party starter,” which becomes a semi-professional gig.

At the next bar mitzvah, Andrew shows his temper — getting in the face of the the parents of a kid bullying Lola — and his reliance on vodka to keep himself entertaining. He also shows resourcefulness when he helps Domino with a bathroom emergency. Soon, even though Domino is engaged to a lawyer, Joseph (Raúl Castillo), who’s working on a case in Chicago, a tentative relationship starts to blossom between Andrew and Domino. (Older women are a pattern for Andrew; in a prologue, Raiff shows us a 14-year-old Andrew, played by Javien Mercado, getting his heart broken when he falls for someone in her 20s.)

When not falling for Domino, Andrew is trying to understand his mom’s attraction to the grumpy Greg, and working to impart some romantic wisdom to David, who is building up to a first kiss with his crush, Margaret (Brooklyn Ramirez).

Raiff has a knack for off-kilter dialogue, and for staging intimate conversations between characters where much is both spoken and unspoken. Raiff’s scenes with Johnson crackle with romantic possibilities, and he’s quite charming as babysitter and friend to Lola, whose guileless honesty is a refreshing change in a world where people guardedly hide their feelings. (Burghardt is making her movie debut here, and she’s a tremendous find.)

“Cha Cha Real Smooth” has a few narrative bumps along the way, but even those come through as earnest efforts to let the characters connect. The movie makes me want to look up “Shithouse,” and look forward to what Raiff does next. 

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‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’

★★★1/2

Premiered Sunday, January 23, in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Tuesday, January 25, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, but probably R for sexual content, language, alcohol use and mild violence. Running time: 109 minutes.

Sundance review: Hostage drama "892" is a muddled story, but serves up strong performances by John Boyega and the late Michael Kenneth Williams

A strong ensemble cast — led by John Boyega, Nicole Beharie and the late Michael Kenneth Williams — can’t quite overcome the narrative confusion of director Abi Damaris Corbin’s “892,” which tries to examine a real-life hostage incident from a few too many angles.

Bodega plays Brian Brown-Easley, who walks into a Wells Fargo branch in Marietta, Ga., one summer morning in 2017 to withdraw some cash. He banters, charmingly and politely, with a teller, Rosa Diaz (Selenis Leyva) — but the banter stops when Brian hands Rosa a note with four words on it: “I have a bomb.”

Across the bank floor, manager Estel Valerie (Beharie) sees something is brewing, and starts quietly telling customers and coworkers to get out of the building. By the time Brian gets loud with his demands, only Estel and Rosa are left in the bank, and the police are on their way.

Outside the bank, the predictable scene unfolds. Squad cars, followed by SWAT teams, the police chief (Robb Derringer) talking to reporters, helicopters flying overhead, and a sniper looking for a clear shot. The officer leading the response, Maj. Riddick (Jeffrey Donovan), argues with the lead negotiator, Sgt. Eli Bernard — played by Williams in one of his last movie roles; he died in September — who eventually talks to Brian and learns they have something in common: They both served as Marines.

Brian explains to Estel and Rosa, and to anyone who will listen, that he doesn’t want the bank’s money. Rather, he wants the monthly disability check he gets from the Veterans Administration, which was unfairly diverted to pay down a debt he said he had already paid.

Through the ordeal, the phone is a lifeline for Brian. He tries to reach his ex, Cassandra (Olivia Washington), and their daughter, Kiah (London Covington). And he gets in touch with a local TV producer (played by Connie Britton), who sympathetically tries to interview Brian and hook up to Eli and the police.

Boyega gives a dynamic performance as the ex-Marine at the end of his rope, and he’s best matched with Beharie as the bank manager trying to keep her fear in check, and Williams as the negotiator trying to make sure everyone gets out alive — no sure thing when most of the people outside the bank are cops with guns.

The problem with “892” is that Corbin and her co-screenwriter, playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah, try to cram all those side stories into the film, and only a few of them rise above the cacophony. In the process, the movie’s message — something about how systems can crush people’s spirits, particularly when those people are of color — gets lost in the noise.

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‘892’

★★1/2

Premiered Friday, January 21, and screened again Sunday, January 23, in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. No further screenings are scheduled on the festival portal. Not rated, but probably R for violence, gore and some sexual content. Running time: 102 minutes.

Sundance review: 'Hatching,' from Finland, is a smart suburban satire wrapped in a chilling body-horror thriller

A girl and her egg are the launching point for “Hatching,” an expertly turned body-horror thriller from first-time Finnish director Hanna Bergholm.

Bergholm starts with a family showing off their picture-perfect life in the suburbs. Mother (Sofia Heikkilä) narrates the tour, which features her smiling husband (Jani Volanen), their too-cute younger son Matias (Oiva Ollila), and the pride of the family, 12-year-old budding gymnast Tinja (Siiri Solalinna). We soon realize this perfection is for show, specifically for Mother’s homemaking vlog. 

While Mother is shooting the introduction for her vlog, cracks appear in her carefully orchestrated pastel-colored world, when a bird flies into the house and starts breaking things. Tinja captures the bird in a blanket, and before she can take it outside to free it, Mother snaps the creature’s neck and tells Tinja to take the body to the compost bin.

Later, Tinja discovers the bird wasn’t quite dead, and crawling out to the backyard woods. It’s there that Tinja discovers the bird’s egg — which she takes into her room to incubate. The egg grows to the size of a coffee table before a scraggly black-feathered beast emerges, and imprints on Tinja, who becomes Elliott to the bird’s E.T.

But the real monster here is Mother, pushing Tinja to the breaking point in her gymnastics practices. When a new girl in the gymnasium, Reetta (Ida Määttânen), moves in next door and befriends Tinja, Mother sees her as a challenger and therefore an enemy. This adds to Tinja’s stress, and when she’s feeling the pressure, the creature does, too — with alarming results.

Bergholm and screenwriter Ilja Rautsi turn this premise into a disturbing changeling tale, as Tinja’s bond with the creature fills in the psychic hole left by her mother’s harsh perfectionism and hypocrisy. (Did I mention Tinja catches Mother making out with the handyman Tero, played by Reino Nordin?) 

Heikkilä makes a compelling wicked queen in this fractured fairy tale, but Solalinna, in her first movie, is a real find — bringing out all of Tinja’s doubts and vulnerabilities, and twisting them as the story reaches its shocking conclusion.

“Hatching” works as both a solid horror movie and as a satire of suburban shallowness and fleeting internet glory — a reminder that scary things don’t just happen in the dark.

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‘Hatching’

★★★1/2

Premiered Saturday, January 22, in the Midnight program at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Monday, January 24, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, but probably R for violence, gore and some sexual content. Running time: 87 minutes; in Finnish, with subtitles.

Sundance review: 'You Won't Be Alone' is a moody, atmospheric version of a disturbing folk tale

As horror movies go, writer-director Goran Stolevski’s feature debut “You Won’t Be Alone” is at once visually disturbing and emotionally tender — a good trick for a movie about a body-changing witch.

The residents of a mountain village in Macedonia, somewhere in the 1800s, are terrified of the stories of a baby-eating witch that stalks the area. The gnarled old witch, Old Maid Maria (Anamaria Marinca), thinks she’s found a baby — but the child’s mother makes a bargain for the witch to return when the girl has come of age. 

Nevena’s mom raises the girl in a cave, hoping to keep Maria from finding her. But when Nevena (played as an adult by Sara Klimoska) turns 16, Maria returns to claim her prize. Nevena runs away, but Maria catches her, and starts training her in the art of surviving as a witch. 

Nevena has to pick up the main trick on her own: How to take over the bodies of humans, so as to blend in with them. Nevena bounces from village to village, and from body to body; some of her victims include Noomi Rapace (Lisbeth Salander in the original “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” trilogy) and Alice Englert (“The Power of the Dog”).

Stolevski, who is of Australian and Macedonian heritage, is stronger on mood than plot, and he creates some stunning and disturbing visuals, particularly of the bloody body-switching process. He understands that the line between folk legend and fairy tale is a blurry one, and there’s something that’s satisfyingly Grimm in the way the story plays out.

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‘You Won’t Be Alone’

★★★1/2

Premiered Saturday, January 22, in the World Cinema Dramatic competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Monday, January 24, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. (It is expected to be released in U.S. theaters on April 1.) Rated R for violence and gore, sexual content, graphic nudity, and sexual assault. Running time: 108 minutes; in Macedonian, with subtitles.

Sundance review: Karen Gillan takes charge in 'Dual,' a deadpan comedy about a woman's struggle with her clone

The idea that someone has to be dying to appreciate what it means to live is a Hollywood trope that goes back to “Dark Victory” — but writer-director Riley Stearns takes it to absurd lengths in his dark comedy “Dual.”

Set in the near future, the story starts when Sarah (Karen Gillan) throws up blood one night, and is ultimately told she has a rare terminal illness and will die soon. She is offered one option, “replacement therapy,” in which she is cloned, and then trains the clone to live out her life after she’s gone.

Not that Sarah’s life is going that well, otherwise. Her boyfriend, Peter (Beulah Koale), is away on business and inattentive in their FaceTime calls. And she’s made an art of avoiding calls and texts from her mom (Maika Paunio). But Sarah goes through with the cloning, and starts training her double in what she likes and doesn’t like.

Ten months go by, Sarah hasn’t died yet, and she learns that her double is living her life better than she is. Peter enjoys the double’s company more, and the double is much more attentive to Sarah’s mother. Then Sarah is told that her supposedly terminal illness is in remission and she’s not going to die. 

Normally, she’s told, the clone would be “decommissioned” — but here, the double demands to remain alive. In such cases, the solution is a televised duel to the death between original and clone. Sarah has one year to prepare, and hires a trainer (Aaron Paul) to get her ready.

In some ways, “Dual” follows some of the contours of Stearns’ last movie, 2019’s “The Art of Self-Defense,” another story of a lonely character finding purpose through personal combat. Stearns’ comic style here is deadpan to the extreme, and some of the humor is bone-dry.

Gillan, known to many for her stint on “Doctor Who” and her role as Nebula in the Marvel franchise, throws herself into the double role — the jaded Sarah and her inquisitive double — with relish. She locks into Stearns’ droll wavelength, while deepening and humanizing the two Sarahs as they go through this odd experience.

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‘Dual’

★★★

Premiered Saturday, January 22, in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Monday, January 24, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Rated R for violent content, some sexual content, language and graphic nudity. Running time: 94 minutes.