Sundance 2020: reviews from the annual indie film festival

The Sundance Film Festival’s experimental New Frontier show has gotten so big and elaborate that it’s becoming its own miniature festival — which means making hard trade-offs about what to see. So I missed some exciting-sounding projects in 2020. Sorry, Chomsky vs. Chomsky: First Encounter, the Noam Chomsky-powered AI. It’s not you, it’s me, sci-fi mushroom simulator Hypha. And the timing just didn’t work out, anti-capitalist live-streamed virtual reality theater Anti-Gone.

Sundance and other virtual or augmented reality-heavy art events might eventually have to grapple with this issue. Projects are getting longer (10 to 30 minutes, versus five to 10 minutes a few years ago), and many can only handle one or two people at a time. For context, the film festival had over 120,000 attendees. Even if only a fraction visit New Frontier, that means a lot of planning or long waits. It’s part of a bigger VR and AR scaling problem — headsets are niche, relatively rare devices that enthusiasts are still figuring out how to build a medium around.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

In 2019, the blockbuster Conjuring franchise produced a film called The Curse of La Llorona, which is generally considered pretty bad. This is unfortunate, because it’s going to confuse a lot of people who hear about the contemporaneous La Llorona — an excellent indie movie that puts a supernatural twist on a story of very human horror.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Shirley Jackson is best known for her creepiest and most misanthropic work, like her novel The Haunting of Hill House and the vicious short story “The Lottery.” But she was also a prolific chronicler of domestic life, publishing two books of lighthearted stories about raising her children. It’s a complexity that was frequently pointed out a few years ago, after the release of a Jackson biography in 2016.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Years ago, the birth of a meme was cause for celebration. So when Matt Furie’s character Pepe first became famous online, it seemed like a good thing. The easygoing cartoon frog was a shorthand for relatable satisfaction or sadness, particularly on the chaotic message board 4chan. And when a friend urged Furie to crack down on copycat Pepes, he didn’t see the need. This was, after all, the age where everything was a remix.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Thomas Edison is the inventor you learn about in school. Nikola Tesla is the inventor you learn about on the internet — whether that’s The Oatmeal’s massive 2012 paean to “the greatest geek who ever lived;” Kate Beaton’s sexy Tesla comic; or the Drunk History episode where he’s played by John C. Reilly. (That’s not even counting the memes about Elon Musk’s car company and David Bowie in The Prestige.)

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

In 2015, a little-known Twitter user named Aziah King posted the first words of a 148-tweet saga: “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this here bitch fell out???????? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.”