Sundance Film Festival — A–Z of films

As the surveys continue, different ideas of happiness emerge along with moments of shared humanity.

Robredo and Ressa are compelling, charismatic figures.

The documentarians invested several years in the project and it pays off in this impressively balanced assessment of a conflict over land that has been exacerbated by climate change and drought.

Filled with awkwardness and tension, the film acts as a spotlight for all the actors.

Documentaries don’t get much more personal or intimate than this

Lin and Sun studiously maintain the enigma around Shuo so that we are left guessing as to whether he’s just a disadvantaged teen trying to make his way in the world or a cuckoo in the nest.

For the most part the film comes across as a celebration of this moment as a light in the darkness, but it will likely leave some viewers additionally uncomfortable.

Impressively, the movie digs into enough warmth and humanity that it pulls the audience through moments of severe cringe with laughs and empathy.

Most impressive for distilling mountains of archival footage, with the help of the trusty talking-head interview.

Slippery in terms of genre and form, the writer/director’s satire puts all his characters and, by extension, us under close scrutiny.

If it sounds like an uncanny valley from the start, Block and Riesewieck illustrate just how bizarre and, sometimes, downright creepy this can be using genuine exchanges that have occurred.

Panigrahi is pitch perfect in her debut role.

Love, loss and laughter come together.

Hvistendahl and her cast have a very strong sense of the emotional weight of the piece.

A fresh spin on territory that has been frequently explored.

Not necessarily successful, but nonetheless compelling, even hypnotic

Thoughtful and stripped of sensationalism, each story and its wider implications bite deep.

The characters speak naturally about the things in their life, and the film trusts us to piece together the essential information.

It tells what could be a goofy story, about awkward teenagers obsessed with a TV series called The Pink Opaque, but portrays it as an ominous, nightmarish mindfuck.

It's got the musicality that proper swearing should.

There's no doubt that by presenting several characters as pure id is quite a dangerous gambit for a filmmaker but Glass keeps things interesting by having them driven by different things.

It might be too much to expect a film to tell a bigger story, but that hope is borne in part because it doesn't really manage to tell a smaller one.

Freire captures not just the emotional but physical force of these relationships, with the women coming to blows, their acts of cruelty to one another as powerful as their acts of love.

One of the most moving portraits of childhood seen recently on the screen.

Everything about El Moudir’s film is unusual, from the structure to the mood.

Park captures the web of life tensions that don’t just stop when we’re teenagers, particularly the pull of the new versus the attraction of nostalgia.

A lesser documentarian might portray her as a broken person, acting out as a result of a tragic past. Lucy Lawless, though this is her first time in the director’s chair, treats her with more respect.

A heartfelt film.

By night, Shreyank Nanjappa’s inspired sound design captures the furious beating of wings and, layered on top of them, the shuffling and chirrupping and all the curious calls of the moths as they rush in to land.

Distances of time and space are collapsible in Fingscheidt’s hands.

A tactile and colour-infused film.

A film that is so focused on the presence we can’t see it forgets to fully flesh out the lives that we can.

A confident and well-constructed tale that is built on the firm foundations of a great ensemble cast.

The Devil, you might say, is in the details.

Eisenberg takes us through the entire journey in a brisk 90 minutes, but the film never feels rushed.

David and Craig Zellner aren’t just here to make us laugh - although they certainly achieve that - they’re also in the business of building a detailed and delicate world around a year in the life of their creatures that proves surprisingly poignant.

Having set up all the elements of a thriller, the film proceeds to untangle them in a refreshingly different and mature way.

Jones and Ross are both strong personalities and the personal aspect of the film is one of its strongest suits.

A hilariously biting film that allows its characters to be their bitter, failed selves rather than part of a political message.

Reaches touching heights as it follows the marked son of a dead sicario from childhood to young adulthood.

It's just not very captivating.

Silly in places but smart in others, and well structured throughout.

Greenbaum pinpoints the tension between the hate eating away at parts of US society and the tremendous potential that the country still has.

Uses the conventions of the romcom to explore one woman’s journey to engage with life on her own terms.