Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot (
Grade: B), Gus Van Sant’s peculiar, ultra-earnest biopic about the late cartoonist John Callahan. Don’t worry,
Don’t Worry isn’t some tearfully inspirational tribute to Callahan’s triumph over his disability. It’s a tearfully inspirational tribute to his triumph over alcoholism. Starring Joaquin Phoenix and Jonah Hill.
American Animals (Grade: B) finds documentarian Bart Layton relocating the true-crime fascination and unreliable point-of-views of his The Imposter to a narrative project. He hasn’t even ditched the nonfiction entirely: To retell the true story of four college kids who plot to rob the rare-books collection of their campus library, Layton disrupts his scripted scenes—featuring Evan Peters and Killing Of A Sacred Deer’s Barry Keoghan as the in-over-their-head ringleaders—with talking-head interviews with the real culprits.
Read more about day two of our Sundance coverage.
Mandy (
Grade: B) is a midnight-movie festival onto itself; over two gonzo hours, it combines giallo, Clive Barker,
Death Wish, prog rock, heavy metal,
Heavy Metal, Guy Maddin,
Mad Max, the dueling-chainsaw climax of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Nicolas Roeg, and Nicolas Cage at his most bugging-out unhinged.
Nicolas Pesce’s violent, irreverent Piercing (Grade: C+) centers on Reed (Christopher Abbott), a clean-cut, closet psychopath who checks into a hotel with the intention of murdering and dismembering a prostitute, in hopes that he can get homicide out of his system before settling down with his wife and newborn daughter.
Lizzie (Grade: C+) is Craig William Macneill’s unconvincing, oppressively somber take on the Lizzie Borden story. Starring Chloë Sevigny and Jamey Sheridan.
Read more about day three of our Sundance coverage.
