Sundance review: 'Sujo' captures a boy's improbable life as it hangs at the mercy of cartel bosses in modern Mexico

Though it sometimes evokes some gangster classics, the Mexican drama “Sujo” is most moving in its quiet passages — showing a boy getting an improbable second chance to break out of a family cycle of violence and death.

When we meet the title character, he’s four years old (played by young Kevin Aguilar) and in the back seat of his father’s car somewhere in Michoacán, while Dad is doing his job: Killing someone at the behest of his drug cartel. 

Not long after, someone has killed Dad, and a cartel boss is trying to find little Sujo — a plot strand reminiscent of young Vito Corleone’s plight in the opening of “The Godfather Part II” — but he’s protected by two of his aunts, Rosalia (Karla Garrido) and Nemesia (Yadira Pérez). Eventually, Nemesia convinces the cartel boss to let the boy live, which the boss does on the condition that little Sujo never be allowed into town.

So Nemesia takes on the role of raising and homeschooling Sujo. The boy’s only friends are Rosalia’s kids, his cousins, Jeremy and Jai. This friendship continues into their teen years, as Sujo (played now by Juan Jesús Valera) starts driving his dad’s old car — and, following Jeremy (Jairo Hernandez), becomes a mule for the cartel. Jeremy won’t let Jai (Alexis Varela) get involved in the cartel action, because Jai is smarter and has better things ahead of him in life.

The writing-directing team of Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez (who co-wrote the 2020 Sundance title “Identifying Features,” which Valadez directed) tell Sujo’s story in chapters — each named for another character influencing the boy’s life. Those include his father, Nemesia, his cousins and, in the last chapter, a university professor (Sandra Lorenzano) who sees his potential to be more than a thief and a gunman like his dad.

Rondero and Valadez don’t need to pad out the melodrama here, because the gritty day-to-day reality Sujo experiences — trying to grow up happy and normal when his very existence is dependent on the whims of crime kingpins — is compelling enough. They do employ dream sequences and some magical realism to show what Sujo thinks his life could be like.

“Sujo” is, in the end, an absorbing, thoroughly lived-in tale of a boy who’s striving to make it into adulthood and knowing that, in his world, that’s a big expectation.

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’Sujo’

★★★1/2

Screening in the World Cinema Dramatic competition of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Not rated, but probably R for strong violence, some sexual content, and language. Running time: 127 minutes; in Spanish with subtitles.

Screens again: Wednesday, January 24, 6:30 p.m., Megaplex Gateway 1/2/3, Salt Lake City; Friday, January 26, 1 p.m., Holiday Village Cinemas 3, Park City. Also available online via the Sundance portal, Thursday-Sunday, January 25-28.

Sundance review: 'A New Kind of Wilderness' is a moving look at a family adjusting to a new life, without the wife/mother who was its center

A gentle movie with a roaring heart, the Norwegian documentary “A New Kind of Wilderness” shows a family in the middle of the hardest transition imaginable: The loss of a wife and mother.

Director Silje Evensmo Jacobsen starts with the hard reality: The death of Maria Gros Vatne, from cancer, at age 41. Maria was a photographer and blogger, who bought a farm in Norway that she and her English husband, Nik Payne, rebuilt and brought to life. They also raised and homeschooled four kids — the oldest, Ronja, from Maria’s earlier relationship, and the younger ones: Freja, Falk and Ulv (aka Wolfie) — in harmony with nature.

As the movie begins, Nik and the kids are dealing with the emotional and practical aspects of Maria’s absence. The practical one is that Maria’s photography brought in the majority of the family’s income, and without that Nik can’t make the payments on the farm. So Nik has to decide to sell he farm, relocate the kids and, for the first time in their lives, enroll them in school.

While Nik works to get the three younger kids settled in their new house, teenage Ronja has moved back in with her father — and is seeing a therapist to cope with the grief from her mother’s death. Part of that grief translates into guilt that it’s too painful to talk about Maria with her sister, Freja (who we see from 10 to, I’d guess, 13 in this film), who needs her big sister now more than ever.

Nik is working through a different kind of guilt: The worry that he’s betraying Maria’s memory, by not being able to raise the kids in nature, on the farm, as she always dreamed. That guilt grows deeper when he contemplates uprooting the kids and moving back to England.

Jacobsen gets her camera into the middle of the Payne family’s lives, capturing tiny moments that carry great emotional weight. Her footage is matched beautifully by the occasional flashbacks, taken from Maria’s home videos of her kids when they were younger. As seamlessly edited by Kristian Tveit and Christoffer Heie, “A New Kind of Wilderness” becomes a moving journey through the Payne family’s grief, love and resilience.

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‘A New Kind of Wilderness’

★★★1/2

Screening in the World Cinema Documentary competition of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for thematic material and the slaughtering of a cow. Running time: 84 minutes; in English and Norwegian, with subtitles.

Screens again: Thursday, January 25, 10:30 a.m., Holiday Village Cinemas 1, Park City; Friday, January 26, 2 p.m., Redstone Cinemas 1, Park City. Also available online via the Sundance portal, Thursday-Sunday, January 25-28.

Sundance review: 'Suncoast' brilliantly captures a girl's growth and a family's grief in the shadow of a national protest

Writer-director Laura Chinn mines her family’s tragedy in the tragicomedy “Suncoast,” and strikes dramatic gold with this heartbreaking story of a teen coping with impending grief on the outskirts of a national controversy.

Nico Parker stars as Doris, a 17-year-old girl living in Clearwater, Fla., circa 2005, with her abrasively forward mother (Laura Linney) and her older brother, Max (Cree Kawa) — who is bedridden and mostly unresponsive, after years of brain cancer. It’s reached the point where Max is near death and needs hospice care to see him comfortably to the end.

Mom, convinced that the hospice nurses aren’t doing enough for Max, decides to sleep on a cot alongside her son. This leaves Doris alone at home — which turns out to be an opportunity for her to host parties and make instant friends with the popular girls at school. It also puts Doris on the radar of Nate (Amarr), one of her school’s cutest boys.

Doris also sees what’s going on outside the hospice: Hundreds of Christian protesters, demanding that another patient in the hospice — Terri Schiavo — not have her feeding tube removed, as per her husband’s wishes. (True story: Chinn’s brother was at the same hospice as Schiavo, whose case became a cause celebre for the religious right, a political football for both George W. and Jeb Bush, and a case study of conservatives being quite happy with government meddling in private medical decisions.) 

Doris befriends one protester, a widower named Paul (played by Woody Harrelson), who’s a more empathetic character than the shorthand view of protesters might lead one to expect.

That’s one of the beauties of Chinn’s film, is that she doesn’t depict anyone as cardboard stereotypes. Mom is overbearing, but also deeply caring and wracked with self-doubt. Doris’ high school friends (Daniella Taylor, Ella Anderson and Ariel Martin) are shallow and occasionally clueless, but they’re also supportive and caring. And Doris herself is sometimes thoughtful and wise, other times self-centered and self-pitying.

Linney gives a powerhouse performance as Doris and Max’s mom, who’s been fighting for her kids for so long she has trouble accepting that she’s at the point where she has to let both of them go — one to her independence, the other to his long-expected death.

Young Parker — who five year ago made her movie debut as Colin Farrell’s daughter in Tim Burton’s “Dumbo” — gives a star-making performance. (It’s in her blood: Her mom is Thandiwe Newton, and her dad is the director Ol Parker.) She captures Doris’ anger at her mom, grief over her brother, and her first faltering steps toward adulthood. At 19, Parker shows in “Suncoast” she has a bright future ahead. 

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‘Suncoast’

★★★★

Screening in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Rated R for teen drug and alcohol use, language and some sexual references. Running time: 109 minutes.

Screens again: Monday, January 22, 9 a.m., The Ray, Park City; Wednesday, January 24, 6 p.m., Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, Salt Lake City; Thursday, January 25, 6 p.m., Redstone Cinemas 7, Park City. Also available online via the Sundance portal, Thursday-Sunday, January 25-28.

The movie is scheduled to begin streaming February 9 on Hulu.

Sundance review: 'Good One' is a father-daughter drama that shows lots of talent but not enough plot

The father-daughter drama “Good One” benefits so much from its strong cast and gorgeous cinematography that one wishes the plot had more meat on it.

Sam (played by Lily Collias) is a 17-year-old girl packing for a weekend hiking trip with her dad (James LeGros). The plan is to hike three days in the Catskills, with Dad’s old friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) and Matt’s son Dylan. At the last minute, though, Dylan cancels, leaving Sam alone to deal with the bruised egos of two divorced dads.

The early scenes set the differences between the two men. Dad is much more serious about hiking than Matt, and chastises him for the extraneous items in his backpack and for eating in his tent — which, as Dad notes, is practically inviting bears to enter their camp. “You can be as reckless as you want with your kid, but not when it’s my daughter,” Dad tells Matt.

Generally, though, the trip is pretty laid back, as writer-director India Donaldson zeroes in on the small details of these three people on their hike and the beautiful scenery of the Catskills where it’s filmed.

It turns out to be a small detail — almost a throwaway line of dialogue, really — that turns this low-stress hiking trip into something more sinister, and forces Sam to reconsider what she knows about Matt and what she thinks about her dad. There’s a later scene between Sam and Dad where the dialogue is pivotal, which puts the onus on Sam to decide what to do next.

LeGros and McCarthy give solid performances, but Collias is the breakout star here. In only her second movie (she had a supporting role in the disturbing 2022 Sundance drama “Palm Trees and Power Lines”), Collias subtly captures Sam’s shifting attitudes and her determination to take action when the men disappoint her. Collias must carry a lot on her shoulders, considering the shallowness of the plot, but her eyes and manner are captivating.

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‘Good One’

★★★

Screening in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Not rated, but probably R for language. Running time: 90 minutes.

Screens again: Monday, January 22, 11:30 a.m., Redstone Cinemas 2, Park City; Wednesday, January 24, Broadway Centre Cinemas 3, Salt Lake City; Friday, January 26, 12:30 p.m., Egyptian Theatre, Park City.Also available online via the Sundance portal, Thursday-Sunday, January 25-28. Also available online via the Sundance portal, Thursday-Sunday, January 25-28.

Sundance review: In 'Ponyboi,' a moving character study of an intersex person is bogged down in predictable crime melodrama

There’s a fascinating, groundbreaking character study at the heart of “Ponyboi,” exploring the hard life of an intersex person — played, the filmmakers say, for the first time in movie history by an intersex person. 

Unfortunately, and this is something the movie works to overcome but can’t quite make it, that character is trapped in the sort of lowlife crime drama that used to be a dime-a-dozen at Sundance.

It’s Valentine’s Day in the early aughts when we meet Ponyboi, played by River Gallo (who’s also the film’s screenwriter), turning tricks at a New Jersey truck stop. That’s one of the jobs Ponyboi performs for their boss, a wannabe gangster named Vinny (Dylan O’Brien). Another is working at a 24-hour laundromat, managed by Vinny’s pregnant girlfriend, Angel (Victoria Pedretti), who’s Ponyboi’s platonic bestie. What Angel doesn’t know is that Vinny sometimes takes Ponyboi in the laundromat’s back room for sex.

That room is also where Lucky (Stephen Moscatello), the brother of Vinny’s gangster boss Two-Tone (Keith William Richards), dies while having sex with Ponyboi — overdosing on a bad batch of crystal meth Vinny is trying to sell. Ponyboi takes the money from Lucky’s briefcase and tries to get out of town, if they can get their testosterone from the pharmacy, or from Charlie (Indya Moore), a trans cabaret owner with whom Ponyboi has a checkered history. Vinny is in hot pursuit, as is Two-Tone.

Ponyboi also gets news from his Salvadoran parents that their dad — who kicked Ponyboi out of the house over their sexuality — is dying. Ponyboi’s hope for rescue is Bruce (Murray Bartlett, from “The White Lotus”), a handsome man in a cowboy hat and a Mustang convertible who’s almost too good to be true. 

When director Esteban Arango (who debuted at Sundance in 2020 with “Blast Beat”) focuses on the aspects of Gallo’s script that center on Ponyboi’s identity, and how they cope with the day-to-day existence of being intersex, the movie is transcendently moving. Too often, though, it’s bogged down in the predictable grime of Vinny’s scheming and the gangster gunplay. 

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‘Ponyboi’

★★1/2

Screening in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Not rated, but probably R for strong sexual content, language, drug use and violence. Running time: 103 minutes. 

Screens again: Sunday, January 21, 10 p.m., Redstone Cinemas 7, Park City; Wednesday, January 24, Megaplex Gateway 1/2/3, Salt Lake City; and Thursday, January 25, 10:30 p.m., Egyptian Theatre, Park City. Also available online via the Sundance portal, Thursday-Sunday, January 25-28.

Sundance review: 'Freaky Tales' is a wild ride, a kaleidoscopic blend of ferocious storytelling and comical violence

“Freaky Tales” is a vibe — a “Pulp Fiction”-style amalgam of comically gory set pieces — and you’re either into it or not. I was definitely into it, riding on its giddy storytelling wave.

Director-writers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden — whose careers have veered from Sundance darlings (“Half Nelson,” SFF ’07) to the MCU (“Captain Marvel”) — tell four interconnected stories set in Oakland, Calif., in May 1987. The common threads of the four tales are bloodshed, the Golden State Warriors’ epic playoff showdown with the Los Angeles Lakers, and a weird green glow that supposedly permeates what locals call The Town.

• The first chapter shows a group of punks standing up for their club against attacks from a group of skinheads, and the budding romance between two of the punks, Lucid (Jack Champion, from “Avatar: The Way of Water”) and Tina (Ji-young Yoo) 

• Chapter 2 introduces Barbie (Dominique Thorne) and Entice (Normani), who work at an ice cream shop by day and enter a battle-rap at night against an Oakland legend, Too Short.

• In the third story, Clint (Pedro Pascal), the muscle for a shadowy figure referred to as “the guy,” who aims to exit the bone-breaking racket to be with his very pregnant wife (Natalia Dominguez) — but a visit to a video-rental store proves fateful.

• And, finally, a story with the title “The Legend of Sleepy Floyd,” referring to the Warriors star (played by Jay Ellis) and his performance on and off the court.

Fleck and Boden have written a tight script, where offhand comments early on turn out to be seeds planted for later twists, where even a random movie reference becomes significant. They have fun playing with visual styles to evoke the ‘80s period — the aspect ratio changes from chapter to chapter, with some showing the static of old VHS tapes while others have “cigarette burns” to mark the reel changes. And they get support from a cast that includes Ben Mendelsohn as an obnoxious cop and Angus Cloud (who died last July) as a heist organizer. 

Like I said, “Freaky Tales” may not be for everyone. The first and fourth chapters evoke levels of stylized violence reminiscent of “Sin City” and “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” while also riffing on classic martial arts movies. If you’re on its wavelength, though, it’s a blast.

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‘Freaky Tales’

★★★1/2

Screening in the Premieres section of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Rated R for strong bloody violence, language throughout including slurs, sexual content and drug use. Running time: 107 minutes.

Screens again: Tuesday, January 23, 7 p.m., The Ray, Park City; Thursday, January 25, 3 p.m., Redstone Cinemas 2, Park City; Sunday, January 28, 8 p.m., Library Center Theatre, Park City. 

Sundance review: 'Exhibiting Forgiveness' is a demanding, but beautiful, story about breaking the cycle of toxic fatherhood

A tough watch but an ultimately beautiful one, “Exhibiting Forgiveness” is an emotional story of the ugly cycle of abusive fatherhood and the difficult work of breaking it.

Writer-director Titus Kaphar’s film is deeply informed by his own experiences, though calling it semi-autobiographical seems inadequate. The main character, Tarrell (André Holland), is a painter, like Kaphar (in fact, Kaphar painted Tarrell’s canvases). Tarrell is quickly becoming an acclaimed young Black artist, and his agent, Janine (Jamie Ray Newman), wants him to mount another gallery show, hot on the heels of his last one. But Tarrell has a deal with his musician wife, Aisha (Andra Day), that he’ll stay home and take care of their son while Aisha records her next album.

Tarrell is also working to help his mother, Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), move out of the house where she raised him — a move Joyce is reluctant to follow through on. Further complicating Tarrell’s life is the sudden return of his father, Laron (John Earl Jelks), a recovering crack addict who treated Tarrell badly as an adolescent, as he applied what he learned from his own father.

It would be easy for Kaphar to lapse into the storytelling clichés of addiction and abuse, and there are moments, particularly in the flashbacks, where the movie comes perilously close to falling into those traps. The cast — Holland, Day, Jelks and particularly Ellis-Taylor — keep the emotions real and raw, and the layers of art, between Tarrell’s paintings the evoke the old neighborhood and Aisha’s music (Day wrote or co-wrote many of the songs here), provide a depth usually not achieved in such tales.

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‘Exhibiting Forgiveness’

★★★1/2

Screening in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Not rated, but probably R for drug content, language and some violence. Running time: 117 minutes.

Screens again: Sunday, January 21, 5:30 p.m., Redstone Cinemas 1, Park City; Tuesday, January 23, 9:15 p.m., Megaplex Gateway 1/2/3, Salt Lake City; and Friday, January 26, 10 p.m., Egyptian Theatre, Park City. Also available online via the Sundance portal, Thursday-Sunday, January 25-28.

Sundance review: 'A Real Pain' is a warm-hearted family story, with Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg shining as odd-couple cousins visiting Poland

The short synopsis of “A Real Pain” — mismatched cousins touring their Jewish grandmother’s former home of Poland — is insufficient to capture the prickly humor and raw emotion that its stars, Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg, serve up.

Eisenberg, who wrote and directed, plays David, a New Yorker who is leaving his comfortable life — wife, toddler son, job — for a week on a “heritage tour” of Poland with his cousin, Benjy (Culkin). They are taking this trip to honor their recently deceased grandmother, Dory, who left Poland ahead of the Nazis.

The cousins are a study in contrasts. David is neurotic, worriedly calling from the cab to JFK. David is laidback, chatting happily with the TSA agent and blithely mentioning the marijuana he bought for the trip. Under that charming facade, though, David has his own problems — which emerge as the trip progresses.

David and Benjy are on a tour with several American Jewish tourists (Jennifer Grey is the most recognizable one) and one Jewish convert (Kurt Egyiawan) — a survivor of the Rwandan genocide now living in Canada. Guided by an Oxford scholar (Will Sharpe), the group visits the remnants of Poland’s Jewish community, culminating in a visit to a concentration camp.

The focus of Eissenberg’s story is the conflicted relationship between the cousins. This opens up the film for two outstanding performances. Culkin’s performance dominates from start to finish, as Benjy veers from effusively excited to angry and morose. Eisenberg gives himself the quieter, more reactive role, and he’s brilliant doing it — though he also gives himself a monologue about midway through the movie that is raw and devastating.

“A Real Pain” asks of its characters, and of the audience, some tough questions about how comfortable our lives are, particularly in comparison to what some of our ancestors faced. The answers are funny and thought-provoking, and it’s good that Culkin and Eisenberg are such energized tour guides on this journey.

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‘A Real Pain’

★★★1/2

Screening in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Not rated, but probably R for language and drug use. Running time: 89 minutes.

Screens again: Sunday, January 21, 9:30 a.m., Eccles Theatre, Park City; Tuesday, January 23, 9:30 p.m., Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, Salt Lake City; Wednesday, January 24, 5:30 p.m., Redstone Cinemas 2, Park City; Friday, January 26, 6 p.m., Megaplex Gateway 1/2/3, Salt Lake City. Also available online via the Sundance portal, Thursday-Sunday, January 25-28.

Sundance review: "Dìdi (弟弟)" is a coming-of-age story that zeroes in on the director's own teen years, and hits the hard universal truths of growing up

Good coming-of-age stories — and writer-director Sean Wang’s Dìdi (弟弟) is a good one — are notable for two things: They are specific to their time and place, and they say something more universal about the pain of growing up.

The time and place for Wang’s semi-autobiographical story is Fremont, Calif., in 2008. It centers on Chris Wang (played by newcomer Isaac Wang), who, like the director then, is a 13-year-old kid of Taiwanese parents. His mom (Joan Chen, who’s wonderful here) works to make a good home, and spends her spare time painting. His dad is never seen, working back in Taiwan and sending money to the family — though Dad’s mother, Nai Nai (played by the director’s grandmother, Chang Li Hua), is there to remind Mom of her shortcomings. The fourth member of the household is Vivian (Shirley Chen), Chris’ older sister, who constantly argues with Chris, but is soon leaving for college at UC-San Diego.

Chris spends this summer before his freshman year of high school hanging out with his buddies, as they pull pranks and shoot video of the results for Chris’ YouTube feed. Chris — known to his buddies as “WangWang” — also pines for a girl in his class, Madi (Mahaela Park), and is thrilled when she asks him to request they be Facebook friends.

Some of Wang’s story details the many different ways Chris is mortified by his mother’s traditional Taiwanese ways — like how she eats a Big Mac by separating the layers and cutting bits off with a knife an a fork. It also shows Chris’ first faltering steps as a filmmaker, when he helps some older teens shoot video of their skateboard tricks.

What makes “Dìdi (弟弟)” so entertaining, and so relatable, is how the specificity of Wang’s adolescent memories — things that could only have happened to him as a Taiwanese American kid in this era — aren’t that far off from what everybody dealt with as a 13-year-old: Being mortified by your parents, fed up with your siblings, eager to learn about the opposite sex but terrified about how to do it, and bottling up rage with no good place to put it. Wang’s childhood looks nothing like mine or anybody else’s, but in the broader sense, it looks exactly like mine and everybody else’s.

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Dìdi (弟弟)

★★★1/2

Screening in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Not rated, but probably R for some sexual content, mild violence, language and drug use involving teens. Running time: 91 minutes; in English and in Mandarin with subtitles.

Screens again: Saturday, January 20, 5 p.m., Redstone Cinemas 1, Park City; Sunday, January 21, 1:45 p.m., Broadway Centre Cinemas 6, Salt Lake City; Tuesday, January 23, 5:15 p.m., Library Center Theatre, Park City; Friday, January 26, 6:45 p.m., Redstone Cinemas 7, Park City. Also available online via the Sundance portal, Thursday-Sunday, January 25-28.

Sundance review: 'Between the Temples' is a comic symphony of discomfort, and a showcase for Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane

A crisis in faith spirals out of control in director Nathan Silver’s “Between the Temples,” and the movie’s narrative comes close to doing the same.

Ben Gottlieb, played by Jason Schwartzman, is a cantor in a synagogue in upstate New York who has been on sabbatical for nearly a year — because, we find out as the movie goes, of his wife’s accidental death just over a year earlier. He tries to sing at a temple service, but his voice won’t cooperate, and goes to hide in his room, in the house of his moms, Mira (Caroline Aaron) and Judith (Dolly de Leon). 

Ben’s boss, Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel), is generous and lets Ben continue to teach the bar and bat mitzvah kids to prepare them for their big event. One day, the class is interrupted by a non-traditional student: Carla O’Connor (Carol Kane), whom Ben recognizes as his grade-school music teacher. She’s retired and widowed, and tells Ben she wants to reconnect with her Jewish roots and take her bat mitzvah — and Ben, after some prodding, agrees to take her on.

The relationship between Ben and Carla takes some off-putting turns (aided in one scene by the hallucinogens in the tea her housemate makes for them). Further complications come from Carla’s adult son (Matthew Shear), and from Rabbi Bruce’s adult daughter, Gabby (Madeline Weinstein), who becomes a wee bit obsessed by the novel Ben’s late wife wrote. 

Silver, who co-wrote the script with C. Mason Wells, thrives in the chaos of throwing these slightly off-kilter characters together to see the sparks fly. There are fun comic bits of business — a door in Mira and Judith’s house that noisily doesn’t stay shut, or Rabbi Bruce’s penchant for cheating at golf — that add some depth to this story of grief, love and other uncomfortable feelings.

The high-wire act Silver and Wells perform ultimately can’t sustain itself — though there’s an epic dinner scene where everyone talks over each other in a symphony of anxieties. What holds “Between the Temples” together are the performances, particularly of Schwartzman as the morose cantor and Kane as the free-spirited older woman who learns that she’s still teaching him important lessons.

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‘Between the Temples’

★★★

Screening in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Not rated, but probably R for sexual content and language. Running time: 111 minutes.

Screens again: Saturday, January 20, 11 a.m., Megaplex Gateway 1/2/3, Salt Lake City; Saturday, January 20, 10 p.m., Redstone Cinemas 7, Park City; Tuesday, January 23, 6 p.m., Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, Salt Lake City; Wednesday, January 24, 3:30 p.m., The Ray, Park City. Also available online via the Sundance portal, Thursday-Sunday, January 25-28.