Buzz Blog

Train Dreams ***1/2 [Premieres]
What does it mean to feel connected? That’s a question with dozens of different tendrils, and somehow it feels like co-writer/director Clint Bentley—adapting with Greg Kwedar a novella by Denis Johnson—manages to touch on nearly all of them in a sure-footed, emotionally rich drama. As narrated by Will Patton (who also performed the audiobook), it’s the story of Robert Grainer (Joel Edgerton), a traveling laborer and logger in the early-20th-century Pacific Northwest, who finally finds a sense of stability in his marriage to Gladys (Felicity Jones) as the country evolves around him. Edgerton’s performance is magnificent, a portrait of internalized manhood built on Robert’s history as an orphan and his attempts to find a sense of belonging both with Gladys and with his itinerant work “family” (including a delightful William H. Macy as a garrulous demolitions expert). But Johnson’s narrative also includes an incident involving a murdered Chinese laborer that haunts Robert throughout his life, and the realization that the natural world that gives Robert his livelihood can also take life. This idea of threads of interconnection and our place in the world (and in the universe) weaves its way throughout the story, with a sense of epic cinema in Adolpho Veloso’s cinematography written on the small canvas of a 100-minute running time. As heartbreaking as it sometimes is as an individual human story, it finds its power in recognizing that no one exists in this world just as an individual.

The Things You Kill **** [World Dramatic]
Every movie I can think of as a point of comparison feels like it would be a spoiler—and that’s probably for the best, since this wildly original psychological drama deserves to stand on its own without such comparisons. Writer/director Alireza Khatami follows a Turkish academic named Ali Özdilek (Ekin Koç) dealing with a variety of stressors: discovering that the inability of he and his wife (Hazar Ergüçlü) to conceive a child is due to his low sperm count; finding that his part-time university job might be cut even further; dealing with the failing health of his mother. When his mother dies, seemingly the result of a household accident, Ali begins to suspect that his father might have been responsible. Along the way, Ali befriends Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), the new worker on his small farm plot, and it’s no coincidence that those two names together make up the filmmaker’s name; trying to reconcile dueling parts of your psyche is a lot of what’s going on here. But Khatami ties that in to cultural ideas of manhood, their accumulated impact over generations, and how terrifying it can be to wonder if you’ll become the same kind of person your parent was. The central performances are all fantastic, and Khatami directs with a deft hand both at building tension and at helping us understand the key moments of dialogue. Perhaps most impressively, it’s a story that feels densely literary but that could only possibly have worked as cinema—no other movie analogies required.

Life After ***1/2 [U.S. Documentary]
We’ve been conditioned to believe that arguing for the “right to die” is a progressive principle; what Reid Davenport’s fascinating documentary presupposes is, “What if it isn’t?” He begins from the high-profile 1983 case of Elizabeth Bouvia, a disabled California woman who argued for her legal right to be denied care so that she could die; Bouvia lost the case, and after a couple of follow-up interviews in the 1990s, seemed to have disappeared entirely from the public record. Part of the film involves Davenport’s search for Bouvia and her family members, and that quest certainly provides a lot of the story’s ultimate emotional punch. But the complexities really emerge as Davenport examines assisted suicide and the “right to die”—including the extremely liberal national laws in Canada—from a disability-rights perspective, questioning how many people seek an irrevocable solution only after realizing that society is unwilling to offer sufficient support for them to continue their lives with purpose and dignity. The phrase “quality of life” becomes an extremely tricky one to navigate—there’s an infuriating secretly-recorded conversation between a doctor and one disabled man’s wife where it’s used as a kind of cudgel—tied up with the ugly history of eugenics. By the time Davenport wraps up with Bouvia’s own words, it’s hard not to despair at how little we seem to care about giving certain people as much support in life as we might be willing to give in death.

DJ Ahmet **1/2 [World Dramatic]
If you watch enough Sundance movies, you know the types of premises that tend to recur, and this crowd-pleaser of a drama combines two of the most familiar: “portrait of repressed grief,” and “young person tries to break free from strictures of a conservative culture/family.” The setting here is rural north Macedonia, where 15-year-old Ahmet Asanov (Arif Jakup) is pulled out of school by his father to help with the family farm after the death of his mother. But Ahmet still has plenty of distractions: his younger brother Naim (Agush Agushev) refusing to talk; his ongoing interest in music; and a neighboring girl named Aya (Dora Akan Zlatanova), whose marriage has been arranged against her wishes. Writer/director Georgi M. Unkovski finds his best moments in the low-key courtship between Ahmet and Aya, and in oddball touches like the town’s muzzein struggling with the computer technology modernizing the call to prayer. Indeed, DJ Ahmet might have been more successful focusing on the way new technology like social media shakes up the established order, but the narrative ultimately gives far too much attention to conflicts with nigh-inevitable resolutions: between Aya and her controlling father (a character whose significance is obvious far too late in the film, and between Ahmet and his own heartbroken dad. It’s clear where an audience will likely break into applause, but it’s equally clear that cheering for someone to be a sheep of a different color isn’t exactly groundbreaking.

The Alabama Solution ***1/2 [Premieres]
In his pre-screening introduction, director Anthony Jareki (Capturing the Friedmans; The Jinx) warned the audience to prepare for an “intense” film. Moments later, a title card on screen warned of “disturbing” images to follow. Ultimately, both warnings were justified, as Jareki’s film—with co-director Charlotte Kaufman—offers a searing, unflinching portrait of the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC), captured in raw detail by a scrappy network of incarcerated cinematographers using contraband smartphones to smuggle the truth of their living nightmares to the outside world. Centered on a cadre of prisoners—including Robert Earl Council, aka Kinetic Justice, and Melvin Ray—The Alabama Solution makes as convincing a case as can be made for prison reform, showing beatings, overcrowding, overdoses, unsanitary conditions and retaliation by guards, including puddles of blood and viscera left behind as friends are disciplined for manufactured infractions and hauled away—to the hospital if they’re lucky, or to the morgue if they’re not. But the filmmakers also make a point to step outside the prison walls, showing the pain and suffering experienced by inmates’ families, the grassroots support mobilized by inmate activism and the institutional response by Alabama’s conservative governor and attorney general. The result is a poignant film examining the 21st-century role of incarceration as modern slave labor, the atmosphere of secrecy permeating criminal rehabilitation and the many perverse incentives that keep a fundamentally flawed system churning as generation after generation of predominantly Black men are exploited, abused and, too often, erased from public consciousness. (Benjamin Wood)