Sundance review: 'Theater Camp' is a smart, funny mock-documentary in the Christopher Guest mold

It’s not often that a movie sets up as many jokes, and lands so many of them, as the semi-improvised comedy “Theater Camp,” which feels a bit like “Waiting for Guffman” for a new generation.

The setting is AdirondActs, a ramshackle summer camp for theater kids in upstate New York. We first see the camp’s founder, Joan (Amy Sedaris), attending a middle school production of “Bye Bye Birdie,” looking for prospective campers, when a strobe effect causes Joan to have a seizure that puts her in a coma — the first time, we’re told in this mock-documentary, that someone has become comatose in a “Bye Bye Birdie”-related accident.

While Joan is hospitalized, her son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) takes over operations — but as a dude-bro YouTube influencer, Troy doesn’t have the business skills or theater knowledge to run the camp. The bank is close to foreclosing on the camp property, and Caroline (Patti Harrison), the corporate rep for the more expensive theater camp next door, is waving an offer at him.

Meanwhile, life at the camp goes on. The central figures among the teaching staff are the drama director, Amos (Ben Platt), and the music director, Rebecca-Diane (Molly Gordon), who lead the casting decisions for the drama-loving campers. They also, by tradition, write and direct an original musical each year that the campers perform — and this year’s musical will be a tuneful biography of Joan.

Gordon (best known for her roles in “Booksmart” and “Shiva Baby”) and Nick Lieberman (who has directed many of Platt’s music videos) directed “Theater Camp,” and they co-wrote it along with Platt and Noah Galvin — who shines as Glenn, the camp’s overworked technical director. The script is informed by the quartet’s experiences as theater camp kids, and leaves room for plenty of improvised moments that show how wickedly talented they are and how much they enjoy working together. 

Gordon and Lieberman stay true to the Christopher Guest school of mock-documentaries. There are no reality-show confessional interviews, and never an ironic look to the camera, a la “The Office.”

Gordon and Platt — best friends since childhood, Gordon said after the movie’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival — have such amazing chemistry that they seem to finish each other’s sentences. Platt’s performance here, as a blowhard drama teacher, may have redeemed his career after the tragedy that was the “Dear Evan Hansen” movie.

Others in the cast who shine are Ayo Edebiri as a newly hired teacher with no expertise, Nathan Lee Graham (“Zoolander”) as an imperious dance instructor, and Owen Thiele as the camp’s quite fabulous costume designer. But the real finds in “Theater Camp” are the array of child actors who give hilarious performances as the camp’s eager students.

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‘Theater Camp’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again Sunday, Jan. 22, 12:15 p.m., Grand Theatre, Salt Lake City; Monday, Jan. 23, 11:55 p.m., The Ray Theatre, Park City; Thursday, Jan. 26, 9:30 p.m., Library Center Theatre, Park City; and Friday, Jan. 27, 9:30 p.m., Rose Wagner Center, Salt Lake City. Also screening online on the Sundance Film Festival platform, starting Tuesday, Jan. 24. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for strong language and some sexual references. Running time: 94 minutes.

Sundance review: Utah-made 'Aliens Abducted My Family...' deploys good clean humor to tell a charming tale of teens looking to the skies

Restoring one’s faith in family-friendly movies, the made-in-Utah teen comedy “Aliens Abducted My Parens and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out” is as funny and as charming as its very long title.

Itsy Levan (played by Emma Tremblay) is decidedly unhappy about her parents’ decision to leave the big city for the small town of Pebble Falls. While Mom (Hailey Smith) and Dad (Matt Biedel) are busy renovating their new fixer-upper house and dreaming of being the next Chip and Joanna Gaines, Itsy tries to avoid her bratty younger brother, Evan (Kenneth Cummins), and fit in at her new high school.

When the school’s queen bee, Heather (Landry Townsend), tells Itsy there’s a high school journalism contest that could send her to study in New York, Itsy jumps at the chance. The prompt for the contest is to write about the weirdest thing in one’s hometown, and Heather has the perfect candidate in mind: Calvin Kipler (Jacob Buster), who comes to school in his own homemade space suit.

Itsy soon learns that Calvin is tracking the imminent arrival of Jesper’s Comet, which passes by Earth once every 10 years. The last time the comet passed, Calvin was six (and played, in flashback, by Cummins’ little brother Thomas), and his parents disappeared — and Calvin maintains they were taken by aliens. Calvin believes that when the comet returns, he will be reunited with his parents, and possibly join them on their interstellar travels.

Director Jake Van Wagoner, a veteran of BYUtv’s sketch-comedy series “Studio C,” and screenwriter Austin Everett put Itsy and Calvin through the expected teen comedy hoops — including a sweetly chaste romance and some serious moments involving Calvin’s parents (Will Forte and Elizabeth Mitchell).

What makes “Aliens Abducted My Parents…” transcend its predictable plot points is the humor level, neither dumbed down or too cynical, and the sincerely charming performances by Tremblay and Buster — two teen actors who could break out into bigger things.

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‘Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out’

★★★1/2

Playing in the Kids section of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again Monday, Jan. 23, 9 a.m., Prospector Square Theatre, Park City; Tuesday, Jan. 24, 6:15 p.m., Grand Theatre, Salt Lake City; and Saturday, Jan. 28, 1:30 p.m., Megaplex Theatres at The Gateway, Salt Lake City. Also screening online on the Sundance platform, starting Tuesday, Jan. 24. Not rated, but probably PG for some mild peril and thematic content. Running time: 85 minutes.

Sundance review: In 'Justice,' filmmakers dig up more about Brett Kavanaugh than the FBI did

Director Doug Liman knows what makes a thriller work — he is the guy who made “The Bourne Identity,” after all — and he applies that sense of white-knuckle pacing to his first documentary, “Justice.”

There’s also a righteous anger bubbling through the film, which examines the allegations of sexual misconduct against Brett Kavanaugh when he was being considered for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court — and how much effort went into burying or ignoring the growing evidence.

Part of the story you know. That’s the story of Christine Blasey Ford, the California academic who reluctantly came forward with an accusation that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in 1982, when they were high school students in Maryland. Ford is seen almost entirely during her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Lesser known, but still commented on at the time, was the story of Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s who also recounted an instance of sexual misconduct. Liman and writer-producer Amy Herdy interview Ramirez here, and her account has not lost any of its devastating sting.

Much of what’s new information in “Justice” involves the FBI investigation the Senate committee requested when the Ford and Ramirez accusations looked like they might topple Kavanaugh’s nomination. Liman and Herdy argue, rather convincingly, that the FBI ignored or buried evidence of more sexual misconduct allegations — including one bit of testimony the filmmakers got their hands on that seems particularly damning. 

Herdy worked on films by documentarian Kirby Dick — such as “The Killing Ground,” about sexual assault on college campuses — and there’s a similarity in this movie’s pace. Liman comes from a lawyerly family (his brother Lewis is a federal judge in New York, and his father Arthur Liman was chief counsel on the committee that investigated the Iran-Contra scandal), and he lays out the case like a good prosecutor.

The odd thing about “Justice” is that the version shown at Sundance in its only screening likely won’t be the one mainstream audiences eventually get to see. The filmmakers announced that they have been receiving more tips, right after Sundance announced the film as a last-minute entry. Depending on what Liman and Herdy find next, “Justice” may never be truly done.

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‘Justice’

★★★1/2

Playing in the Special Screenings section of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. No other festival screenings have been scheduled. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for verbal descriptions of sexual misconduct. Running time: 85 minutes.

Sundance review: 'Deep Rising' features beautiful undersea footage, and some shady dealings on land

Beautiful undersea footage and some ugly human activity share top billing in “Deep Rising,” a documentary that follows the efforts of late-stage capitalism to exploit the last place on Earth it hasn’t already dug in: The depths of the oceans.

The first human we see in director Matthieu Rytz’s film is Gerard Barron of DeepGreen Metals, preaching the gospel of clean-energy vehicles, and what he calls an environmentally friendly way to mine the rare earths and other metals needed to make their batteries. Those are something called polymetallic nodules, little lumps of minerals that lie on the seabed at the bottom of the Pacific. Harvesting them — not even mining them, he says — would be easy with the right equipment, and wouldn’t harm the sea floor on which they rest.

Nonsense, say the scientists. One of them, a Chilean marine geologist named Sandor Muslow, even resigns from the UN-sanctioned governing body of the sea floor, the International Seabed Authority, because of what Muslow sees as a lack of transparency and conflicts of interest. The footage of the ISA’s meetings in Kingston, Jamaica, will look depressingly familiar to anyone who’s encountered such global bodies as the International Olympic Committee or FIFA. 

As Rytz shows this dispute on land, as Barron seeks investors for his mining-not-mining business and Muslow tries to convince people of the folly of the enterprise, the movie gives us breathtaking views of creatures that live in the dark depths of the ocean. The movie also provides a voice in their defense: The narrator, Jason Momoa, Aquaman himself, intoning with deep seriousness about the life far below. (At least he never refers to his “finny friends,” as the narrator on “Super Friends” used to do.)

It pays to stick with “Deep Rising” past the first few minutes. Rytz’s introduction of Barron might make a view think the movie was trying to sell them on DeepGreen’s plans. After the initial footage of Barron in a room with possible investors, the true contours of the movie’s argument becomes clear: When an industrialist tells you he can extract metals from anywhere without environmental consequences, don’t believe him.

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‘Deep Rising’

★★★

Playing in the Premieres section of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on Saturday, Jan. 21, at 6:45 p.m., Grand Theatre, Salt Lake City; Wednesday, Jan. 25, at 6 p.m., Screening Room, Sundance Mountain Resort; Thursday, Jan. 26, at 6 p.m., Redstone Cinemas, Park City; and Saturday, Jan. 28, at 11:30 a.m., Holiday Village Cinemas, Park City. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some language. Running time: 93 minutes.

That's a wrap! Here's what I wrote about at the online-only 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

The Sundance Film Festival is always exciting — even when, for the second year in a row, I spent it in my house.

After planning and hoping for a hybrid festival, with screenings in person in Park City and online, Sundance canceled the in-person part 15 days before the festival’s launch date — because of spikes in case counts for COVID-19, nationally and in Utah. So we were all back to watching movies through Sundance’s online portal, which was really good. (Did anyone else figure out the trick where you can watch two movies scheduled at the same time, back-to-back?)

Besides my reviews of 24 movies (not as many as I could have watched, if I didn’t have obligations with my new day job at The Salt Lake Tribune), here are the stories on sltrib.com that I filed:

• I wrote up some helpful tips for how to navigate the online-only festival.

• Sundance made some late additions to the line-up — two documentaries before the festival, and one announced midway through.

• I covered the festival’s opening night, including a beautiful statement video from Sundance founder Robert Redford. I also watched the fascinating documentary “32 Sounds” (which I didn’t review because I had to step away for a few minutes in the middle to file a story).

• I wrote about the one documentary a certain segment of Utah audience would most be interested in reading about: The Finnish documentary “The Mission,” which follows four missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Finland. I interviewed the director, Tania Anderson, before the premiere, then listened in on the Q&A for reaction from the missionaries who appeared in the film — who, I’m told, hadn’t seen it before.

• I talked to the founders of an Ogden special-effects house, who did the fake gunplay and blood splatter for director Michael Polish’s dark neo-Western series “Bring On the Dancing Horses.” Their SFX work is particularly in demand right now, after the tragic death of a cinematographer on a film set in New Mexico, killed when a prop gun went off with a live round in it.

• And I covered the festival’s awards “ceremony” — announced on Twitter, like the Golden Globes, but with pre-recorded acceptance speeches. Then, I added my own awards the juries didn’t consider.

That’s it for Sundance ‘22. Here’s hoping we can be back in Park City for 2023, so I can see some of my movie friends.

Sundance review: 'Palm Trees and Power Lines' is a precise depiction of a 17-year-old's summer encounter with an older man — but it's an ordeal to watch

It’s possible to admire a movie’s craft and find the subject matter, and its handling of it, absolutely repulsive — which is how I reacted to director Jamie Dack’s coming-of-age-in-a-damn-hurry drama “Palm Trees and Power Lines.”

Lea (played by newcomer Lily McInerny) is a bored 17-year-old wasting her summer in a nameless suburb near a beach that could be anywhere from the Puget Sound to the Florida Panhandle. (The movie was filmed in suburbs near Los Angeles.) She hangs out with the stoner guys, and sometimes lets one of them, Jared (Timothy Taratchila), have sex with her in the back of a car. She spends a lot of time with her best friend, Amber (Quinn Frankel), and avoiding her mom, Sandra (Gretchen Mol), who is dating a new guy and therefore tends to be absent.

One night, when she’s nearly getting caught when her buddies pull a dine-and-dash at a burger joint, Lea is rescued by Tom (Jonathan Tucker), a charming guy who drives a big truck. Tom offers Lea a ride home, and she accepts. They exchange phone numbers, even after Tom informs her that he’s 34 — literally double her age.

The back-and-forth continues, with Tom asking Lea to hang out, then go get dinner, and so on. Lea withholds information from Amber because “I don’t want to jinx it,” saying only that she’s seeing somebody “who goes to another school.” But what Lea perceives as Tom being attentive, we in the audience see it for what it is: Grooming.

Dack, adapting her 2018 short film of the same name, and co-screenwriter Audrey Findlay do an expert job capturing the lazy rhythms of Lea’s laid-back teen life — the days of casually hanging out, watching YouTube tutorials, playing at being grown-ups while still unprepared for the emotional fallout.

And Dack has found an astonishing young star in McInerny, who gives a gut-wrenching performance as a teen who acts tough and smart, but is still aching for affection — the perfect target for an operator like Tom. It’s hard to believe that McInerny’s only other screen credit, according to IMDb, is a momentary role in a 2017 Elton John video.

Even as one acknowledges the quality of McInerny’s performance and Dack’s filmmaking, it’s still an ordeal to actually watch “Palm Trees and Power Lines.” Part of that is the mere depiction of sex trafficking, and how insidiously it works its way into Lea’s life. But there’s also something ponderously predictable in the telling, that sense that we can all see the slow-motion train wreck long before it happens — and when it hits, there’s no relief, only despair.

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‘Palm Trees and Power Lines’

★★1/2

Premiered Monday, January 24, and screened again Wednesday, January 26, in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. No more screenings scheduled on the festival portal. Not rated, but probably R for strong sexual content and drug use — all involving teens — language and some nudity. Running time: 110 minutes.

Sundance review: 'Aftershock' tells heartbreaking human stories to illustrate America's maternal death rate

The heartbreaking documentary “Aftershock” leaves a deep mark on the soul, as it puts human faces — boyfriends, mothers and children — to a chilling fact: Black women are four times as likely to die in childbirth than white women at similar economic levels.

The explanations that directors Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee (wife of Spike Lee) list for that statistic are equally troubling. Black women are more likely to be given C-sections, to speed the delivery along, and because hospitals get more money for C-sections than vaginal births — and Black women are more likely to be covered by Medicare or Medicaid, rather than private insurers. Also, the medical establishment pushed midwives, particularly Black midwives, out of the business. And, the film notes, Black women in the time of slavery were experimented on in the early days of what’s now called gynecology.

While the facts are depressing, the human stories are terribly sad. Shamony Gibson, age 30, was sent home with her new baby after a C-section, and was told to “just relax” when she reported shortness of breath; she died two weeks later from a pulmonary embolism. Amber Rose Isaac’s platelet levels were dropping into the danger zone for weeks before she had her baby, and she died during her C-section.

Gibson’s mother, Shawnee Benton-Gibson, started organizing rallies and mobilizing protests. Shamony’s partner, Omari Maynard, a painter and now single father of two, teamed up with Rose’s partner, Bruce McIntyre, to launch a support group for husbands and partners of women who died during childbirth, and speak to medical students about the unconscious biases that have to confront to give equitable care to all patients.

It’s in these stories that Eiselt and Lee find the heart of the problem. While hospitals send out anodyne statements that “every death is a tragedy” without taking responsibility, these families show in detail the emotional costs of systemic bias.

There is hope in “Aftershock,” though. Some professionals are taking the issue of bias in medicine seriously. And the movie follows one couple who decide to hire a doula to assist their childbirth, to avoid the hospitals and C-sections. When the film shows that baby born, and that mom healthy, it’s a sign that there is a better way than obstetric medicine as it’s practiced today. 

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‘Aftershock’

★★★1/2

Premiered Sunday, January 23, and screened again Tuesday, January 25, in the U.S. Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. No more screenings scheduled on the festival portal. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some nudity, a childbirth scene, and some language. Running time: 89 minutes.

Sundance review: 'TikTok, Boom' is a great guide for grown-ups trying to figure out what their kids are watching — and why it matters

Essential viewing for parents who want to know what their teens are watching on their phones, the documentary “TikTok, Boom” is a solid lesson in what the social-media app does and why it’s generated such opposition in Washington and Silicon Valley.

The basics, for those who don’t know: TikTok is a video-heavy social media platform that has had more than 2 billion mobile downloads worldwide (as of October 2020). It was started in 2016 by the Chinese company ByteDance, first marketed in China under the name Douyin (which is what it’s called in China today). In 2018, ByteDance merged a version of Douyin with the app Musical.ly, and TikTok was born.

As covered by director Shalini Kantayya (who explored racism by algorithm in the 2020 Sundance doc “Coded Bias”), TikTok’s secret sauce is using data collection from every second a user watches any video, and running through an algorithm that predicts what the user is most likely to want to watch next — which it posted to the app’s “For You” page. 

The algorithm’s accuracy is uncanny. As one TikTok poster shown in the documentary says, “Are any other girls, like, kinda aggravated that it took more than 20 years to figure out we were bisexual, but it took my TikTok algorithm, like, 37 seconds?”

With popularity, though, comes criticism. The experts Kantayya interviews note that TikTok isn’t a creation of Silicon Valley, but of China — and many have shown concern that a Chinese firm could be collecting data on so many people, particularly teens. (Currently, data from TikTok in the United States is collected in the U.S., with a backup in Singapore; no U.S. data is stored in China, executives for the company say.) 

The movie suggests that TikTok was a convenient punching bag for Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, to throw congressional watchdogs off of his scent. And it was a juicy target for Donald Trump, along with all things Chinese, as a distraction from his lethal bungling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The most interesting stories told in “TikTok, Boom” are from content producers for the app itself. There’s Feroza Aziz, an Afghan-American teen who connected with thousands of others from Afghanistan — until her account was suspended because she made mention of the genocide of Uyghurs in China. There’s Deja Foxx, who went viral when she challenged former Sen. Jeff Flake about Planned Parenthood in a town hall, and parlayed that into videos and political activism. And there’s Spencer X, a beat-boxer who built a fortune out of his videos, and risked losing it all when Trump attempted to ban TikTok in the United States.

The problem with a documentary like “TikTok, Boom” is that its shelf life is as short as the app’s. By the time this movie gets out to a general audience, it’s quite possible that the next social-media platform will already be trying to replace it.

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‘TikTok, Boom’

★★★

Premiered Sunday, January 23, and screened again Tuesday, January 25, in the U.S. Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. No more screenings scheduled on the festival portal. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language and some sexual content. Running time: 90 minutes.

Sundance review: 'Navalny' is a tense spy thriller wrapped in a compelling political drama wrapped in a smart documentary

A spy thriller in real life, unfolding right in front of the cameras, director Daniel Roher’s “Navalny” is one of those movies that had to be a documentary —  because no screenwriter would dare turn in something so on the nose.

The movie starts near the end of the story, on Jan. 17, 2021, when Alexei Navalny — leader of the Russian opposition, anti-corruption activist and thorn in Vladimir Putin’s backside — is getting ready to leave Germany and return to Russia. Navalny knows he’ll be arrested when he gets there, on trumped-up charges meant to silence him. It’s no spoiler to say that’s exactly what happened.

Roher then goes back to what Navalny was doing to attract such hardline behavior from Putin’s government. The video footage shows Navalny leading protest rallies, whipping up support from thousands of Russians for his campaign to root out the corrupt leadership of Putin’s kleptocracy. Putin’s government breaks up protests, bans him from TV and won’t let his image appear in newspapers. He maintains his following through social media, with a video blog with millions of followers.

In a later interview with Roher, Navalny says he may have assumed he would be safe because he was so well known. “If I’m famous, It will be problematic for them just to kill me,” Navalny tells Roher, adding, “I was very wrong.”

On Aug. 22, 2020, Navalny was flying from Tomsk, in Siberia, back to Moscow when he started crying out in pain. The plane landed in Omsk, and he was rushed to a hospital. After delays that Navalny’s team said were suspicious, and after being called out by European leaders, Navalny was flown to Germany for treatment. Doctors there said Navalny had been poisoned, by a nerve agent called Novichok — a signature concoction used on Putin’s enemies.

Meanwhile, in Vienna, a Bulgarian data nerd, Christo Grozev, enters the narrative. Grozev runs Bellingcat, a data-driven investigative journalism outlet, and he dug into Russian plane manifests and phone records (some bought off the black market) and seemed to have found the men who poisoned Navalny — and proof that they were linked to Putin’s government.

That investigation, and the fallout from it, is at the heart of Roher’s movie. It all sounds so outlandish, and sometimes so ridiculous — there’s even a bulletin board with red yarn, like in a conspiracy thriller — that you have to remind yourself that it’s all happening. (It’s also a reminder that Navalny is very aware of his image, as anyone with millions of social-media followers must be.)

Roher doesn’t put Navalny up as a plaster saint. There are some rough edges to this freedom-fighter persona — like the fact that he shared the podium with Russian white-supremacist groups early in his career. “It’s my political superpower,” he tells Roher, “I can talk to anyone.”

Even with a foregone conclusion, Roher’s movie has the feel of a gripping political thriller. Credit the drum-tight editing by Langdon Page and Maya Daisy Hawke, and the intriguing cast of characters that includes Navalny’s team and his iron-willed wife, Yulia.

Of course, the problem with “Navalny” is that we don’t know the ending. Alexei Navalny is locked away in a Russian prison, while the man who (allegedly) ordered him killed is leading a large nation and has access to nuclear missiles. If that doesn’t make you scared and angry, maybe this riveting documentary will.

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‘Navalny’

★★★1/2

Premiered Tuesday, January 25, in the U.S. Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Thursday, January 27, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language, footage of police violence, and descriptions of poisoning. Running time: 98 minutes; in English, and in Russian with subtitles.

Sundance review: 'The Janes' lets the women who spearheaded an abortion-rights movement to speak for themselves

If there must be talking-head documentaries, let those heads have the sort of powerful voices and fascinating personalities as directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes convene in “The Janes,” a history lesson about abortion rights that is more relevant than some would like it to be.

The women interviewed here were all involved in an underground network that ran in Chicago from 1968 to 1973 that was called, simply, Jane. The idea was that if a woman was pregnant back then — when abortion was illegal in 46 states — and didn’t want to be, and couldn’t afford to fly somewhere it was legal, they would call Jane. The number was printed in underground newspapers and on bulletin boards all over town.

The women involved with Jane would take down a woman’s information on a 3-by-5 index card, ask them to come to a location, called “The Front,” for a consultation — and from there be taken to another place, called “The Place,” where someone could perform an abortion.

This service didn’t spring up out of nowhere. Many of the women interviewed recounted their own experience trying to end an unwanted pregnancy — and describe bloody procedures, uncaring practitioners, condescending doctors, and a whiff of Mob involvement. (It’s Chicago.) They also described Chicago’s power structure as patriarchal, and the male leadership of the protest movement, from the anti-war marches to the Black Panther Party, weren’t too supportive of women’s issues. So the first members of Jane teamed up and went to work.

Lessin (who co-directed the 2008 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner “Trouble the Water”) and Pildes get engaging interviews with the onetime Jane members — most of who must be in their 70s now, but are still fierce in their defense of reproductive rights. And while the movie’s narrative stops in 1973, when Roe v. Wade made the Jane network unneeded, the undertone of this vital chronicle is that history is on the verge of repeating itself.

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‘The Janes’

★★★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 PG-13 for language, footage of police violence, and verbal descriptions of a medical procedure. Running time: 102 minutes.