Sundance Film Festival — A–Z of films

It's exploitation cinema but it's made with care.

A fascinating, if skewed, account of creativity gone wild.

Groeningen completely sells us the world of the bar, his immersive tracking and handheld camera leading us into the melee where coke and hedonism are served straight up and the music pounds to be let into your bloodstream.

Parker's reductive approach, more concerned with creating a hero than depicting a man, means it never achieves the impact that it ought to.

Brilliantly original.

Cements Shashank Arora - so good in gritty drama Titli and demonstrating sharp comic timing here - as an up-and-coming Indian star to look out for.

The people encountered while working as a cinematographer for different documentarians, shooting all over the globe, are woven into a fascinating, irregular net of meaning.

Taken as a whole, however, the director is trying too hard, pushing this family so far into caricature that we lose sight of the story of grief that is underpinning the shenanigans.

"At the heart of the kingdom there is nothing," it says, but all the fascinating splendour that exists around that gap!

Certain Women is a film suffused in uncertainties.

Craig Shilowich's careful scripting avoids all the usual mental illness cliches and hystrionics to help us sympathise with her even in her most unpleasant moments.

The film itself has a fluid identity, part will they/won't they romance, part mystery and part unsettling thriller.

This film is worth seeing simply for its National Geographic style snapshot of rural Mongolia.

Structurally illustrates how the indigenous people don't see time as being a chronological straight line but as multiple realities existing simultaneously.

Magalhaes is superb throughout and perfectly in sync with the childlike perspective on events that Pesce brings us.

The physicality and fluidity of adolesence are brought to the fore by Anna Rose Holmer in her tightly directed debut feature that avoids the bear traps of American coming-of-age cliche to offer a classy, thoughtful character study.

Everything here is sincerely meant but Gobadi struggles to make the stories fit together in any meaningful way, with the scripting paradoxically too loose for most of the film and then suddenly far too on the nose.

Some of the plot twists strain believability but Ross has a tight hold of the film's emotional drivers, mixing moods like a heady and dangerous cocktail so that a disturbing tension builds.

While his narrative is over-written, Lew has an unfussy and measured directing style that offers promise.

Neel’s movie grips not because of its depiction of hazing, although that is sweaty, disturbing and naturalistic, but because of the psychological tension that builds between the two brothers.

The direction and writing may show signs of first-time work but Karanovic's fearless performance is one of an actress right on the top of her game that smooths over the cracks in plausibility and holds you hard in its gaze.

Less psychological and more formulaic than his previous feature, this is still relentlessly entertaining.

Taika Waititi knows growing up isn't child's play but he also respects childhood as a place of adventure, where spontaneity rules and the possibilities are only limited by imagination.

The sheer volume of evidence Nanfu has amassed - material she had difficulty smuggling out of the country - is difficult to argue with.

A sensitive and well-produced account of a complex situation.

The Innocents may well be a historical film but it still has plenty of relevance today.

Britto is, essentially, targeting only low-hanging fruit.

Robert Greene's intriguing semi-documentary explores the event through a process not dissimilar to Chubbuck's own.

Caple and his cinematographer Steven Holleran definitely get the look even if the story doesn't quite deliver.

The randomness of death in times of war aside, Land Of Mine - perhaps unavoidably - leans towards the conventional in its overall narrative arc.

This is not about once upon a times or fairy tale endings but the challenges on the way and it stands as a testament to the love and determination of every member of the Suskind family.

The film could be called "old fashioned" but that is rarely a bad thing.

Lanthimos satirises our obsession with relationships and modern day electronic dating rituals although the results are not nearly as funny and knowing as the director clearly thinks.

Whitman respects and relishes in Austen's creation but is no slave to it, inventing additional characters to help the story flow.

This is a poetic documentary, a reverie, in which partitioned themes offer differing perspectives on the whole.

At the midway point, the screenplay begins to flap about all over the place but Smoczynska's firm, high-energy directing - including an extras-laden shopping centre extravaganza - doesn't stop to let you consider them for too long.

Director Rebecca Miller gets terrific performances out of an admittedly terrific cast.

The film has an intensity that creates its own tension.

With a life as rich as this it's inevitably difficult to cover everything, but Hercules and Whack indulge their audience with as much as it's likely to be able to take in.

Cheadle attempts to give us the feel of the man rather than the real essence.

Manchester By The Sea is a masterful study of clumsiness.

It is Hartigan's ability to deal in specifics that mark his films out from the crowd.

Luna wallows in emotional gloom like a pig in mud, coating the script in a layer after layer of regret to little purpose.

Hull's reflections touch on areas the sighted rarely stop to consider, such as the way that still photos are easier to remember than actual physical moments with loved ones.

Hákonarson proves himself a master of his material - a sort of rural Ken Loach - shooting sparingly yet dramatically against extreme weather conditions.

The heart of James Redford's documentary about toxic stress and its affect on physical health is in the right place but the execution never rises above the pedestrian.

Our sympathies are torn and turned on a dime.

All in all, this is a troubling but well-presented and thorough examination of the settler conundrum facing Israel today.

Carney simply loves the music of the era and adores these kids, and his affection is infectious.

There's often a question mark over how involved a documentarian has become with their subject and here Ghaemmaghami confronts the issue head on, showing how she becomes not just a recorder of what happens but a catalyst for change.

Heder shows no signs of nerves with her first feature, boldly creating a trio of women who are, initially, prickly at best, slowly fleshing them out to reveal each as altogether more complex.

The sleeping and waking worlds begin to tumble together, with cinematographer Kit Fraser using his camera to add to the unsettling atmosphere, spinning the image at key moments or rocking it to ratchet tension.

Singer and McQuarrie expertly sustain a rich and tantalising conceit, keeping the reader guessing to a superb climax – and beyond.

He seemingly lets the camera into almost every nook and cranny, so that a picture emerges of not only him but the media goldfish bowl people like him inhabit.

Wiener-Dog is a Solondz film through and through – there's still no-one daring to be quite so acerbic and inhumane towards his characters while keeping them grounded in a sense of relatable experience.

The phrase 'brave performance' is vastly overused but there's no doubt Stangenberg puts herself at some risk here.

An unrelenting, yet utterly mesmerising cinematic vision.