Sundance 2020
Zola Turns a Twitter Thread Into a Thrilling Dark Comedy: Review
This review originally ran as part of our Sundance 2020 coverage and has been updated as of June 2021. The Pitch: “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out????????” began Aziah “Zola” Wells’ epic 2015 Twitter thread, a near-mythic tale of strippers, murder, and kidnappings that went immediately viral. Five years later, here we are, with the first film ever derived from a series of tweets, recounting the story of how Zola (Taylour Paige) falls in with a fellow stripper named Stefani (Riley Keough), who ends up roping her into a road trip to Tampa with her boyfriend Derrek (Succession‘s Cousin Greg himself, Nicholas Braun) and her “roommate” X (Colman Domingo). But it doesn’t take long before Zola figures out the real score: Stefani turns out to be a sex work...
Tesla Wildly Reinvents the Biopic with an Inventive Ethan Hawke Performance: Review
This review originally ran as part of our Sundance 2020 coverage. The Pitch: By now, we all know the story of Nikola Tesla, spurned early 20th-century inventor and rival of Thomas Edison who invented alternating current, only to die penniless, his name largely lost to history until Christopher Nolan, Elon Musk, and the Fuck Yeah Science! corners of the Internet rehabilitated his unconventional genius. (Best not to mention the fact he was also a eugenicist, but that’s neither here nor there.) Now, one of America’s most under-appreciated minds has a full-throated biopic, with Ethan Hawke in the title role, charting his rags-to-riches-to-rags story. Of course, this being a Michael Almereyda joint, things get deeply weird. Welcome to Your Life: Make no mistake: Tesla ain’t your ...
Sundance Film Festival May Have Contributed to Spread of Coronavirus
The Sundance Film Festival may have been a contributing factor to the spread of COVID-19, at least according to a new report by The Hollywood Reporter. The publication profiled several attendees — from festival regulars to one anonymous high-profile actor — all of whom reported similar symptoms linked to the coronavirus. One of the report’s more forthcoming interviews involved actress Ashley Jackson, who admitted that she and her colleagues had been calling their illness the “the Sundance Plague” at the time. “We all had the same symptoms, all had the cough, all had trouble breathing at night,” she explained. “Some of us got humidifiers and some got oxygen.” Eventually, Jackson recovered three weeks later. However, once news of COVID-19 began to spread, she stopped speculating and contacte...
