Reviews

Harlan Jacobson On Sundance 2023

It's Sundance film festival time, and this year’s edition, which closes this weekend by announcing winners in both feature and documentary competitions in the US and internationally, showed better than 100 feature length films from 23 countries, of which nearly 95% are world premieres. 32 films are by first time directors, and 17 were developed by Sundance in its own workshop labs.

Harlan Jacobson On the 95th Academy Awards

We're in the final hours of Oscar chatter which began about a year ago and ends with the 95th Academy Awards this Sunday night. Oscar handicapping usually starts just after the last one ends, but last year, we were consumed for weeks afterwards by The Slap.

Harlan Jacobson Considers 2021 Film Standouts

In a year that promised to be chock full of eagerly anticipated film titles held over from 2020 – In the Heights, West Side StoryThe French Dispatch -- the air went out of 2021, the way it seemed to leave the country. There was very little fresh air to go round anywhere, even off to the side in the film sector, try as it might to breathe some life into the culture.

Harlan Jacobson on the Best of 2022

Unmoored from a robust theatrical release schedule, the professional voyeurs we call film critics spent this third year emerging from Covid looking at character driven films more from the festival circuit, both real time and virtual, and virtually writing off studio “product.” Our film critic, HJ, spent 2022 either going to Sundance, SXSW, Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, or the New York film festival in body or in virtual spiri

Harlan Jacobson Reports from Sundance Film Fest 2022

The strongest among the films I caught up with were mostly those about the great disconnect, as if there’s just some information missing in what’s going down between characters onscreen. There’s no great theme at work here, or maybe not consciously, since what’s on display is as much a function of what got made during the last two years of social shutdown as what got chosen by festival programmers.

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