Our coverage of Sundance Film Festival continues with more reviews of the festival's official selections.
Last Days
One of the finest documentaries from 2023 was Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ The Mission, the story of 26-year-old Christian missionary John Allen Chau. Chau made it his passion to spread the lord’s word in some of the most isolated and dangerous locations on earth, including among the uncontacted tribe of North Sentinel Island off the coast of India. Things didn’t end well for him, and his body was never recovered. The doc asked important questions about missionary work, such as who asked anyone to come into these places and force their beliefs upon people unsolicited? Was Chau a hero, a martyr, or an invader?
Now we have Last Days, from director Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow, five of the Fast & Furious franchise entries), a work that seems more intent on casting itself as a thriller and less a look at Chau’s misguided ambitions, a disservice to the material.
Much of Last Days centers on the investigation into his actions and eventual disappearance. It is illegal in India to visit North Sentinel, and when an eager female detective from the Andaman Islands (Radhika Apte) gets wind of Chau’s plan, she sets out trying to stop him. When it becomes clear he may have already hired a boat to take him close to the island, it becomes a recovery operation for her. Meanwhile, her unmotivated boss (Naveen Andrews) wants to shut the operation down, at least until the U.S. Embassy calls looking for updates. The story is also fleshed out with Chau’s missionary history, including a run in with and radicalization by a Christian bro (Toby Wallace) and even a potential love interest (Marny Kennedy), just days before his final push to the island. We also learn about the complicated relationship with Chau’s doctor father (Ken Leung), who thought his son would follow in his footsteps.
All of these subplots and other story threads divert from asking the tough questions about the kind of person Chau had become. Was he simply a religious thrill seeker, or was he a troubled young man, driven by societal pressures on Asian-American men with strong religious beliefs? With a screenplay by John Ripley (Source Code), based on magazine article about Chau’s journey, Last Days feels distracted by its own lead character’s complexities, filling his story with unnecessary details. The struggle of the female detective trying to make progress on her investigation while a host of male counterparts stand in her way and give her no support is probably the only part of this story that was worth telling in addition to Chau’s, but even that leads us in directions that seem irrelevant. As we know from The Mission, this is a worthy and tragic story, but this isn’t the best telling of it in the last couple of years. (Steve Prokopy)
Love, Brooklyn
Sundance is at its best when screening an official selection feels like a sense of discovery, and such is the case for the feature filmmaking debut of Rachael Holder, Love, Brooklyn. Written by Paul Zimmerman, the film is an intimate slice of life in the titular New York borough seen through the eyes of writer and cyclist Roger (the ever-charming André Holland) in the year the city emerged from the pandemic. Roger is recently broken up with girlfriend Casey (Nicole Beharie), owner of an art gallery, and is currently seeing (but not dating, exactly) Nicole (DeWanda Wise), a single mother. Over the course of the film, Roger will wander in and out of each of the women's lives and confer more than once with best friend Alan (Roy Wood, Jr.) as he tries to sort out exactly what his next steps are at this uncertain time in his life.
Holland, bolstered by Beharie and Wise, is the warm and approachable heart of the film, but the combination of Holder's unfancy direction and Zimmerman's unpretentious script are the true discoveries here. There is a sense of Holofcener or DuVerney in the film's DNA, concerned as it is with the lived experience of its characters and the truth in interpersonal relationships that may not come easy but are always worth investing in. Roger is assigned to write an article about post-pandemic New York City, and he's as much searching for that narrative as he is trying to decide who he's in love with...or if he is at all.
Child actors are always a gamble and here, Love, Brooklyn suffers slightly from a choppy performance from the young girl who plays Nicole's daughter (Cadence Reese), but that's a small quibble for a film that is ultimately a lovely love letter to Brooklyn. Indeed, in the scenes of Roger cycling down city streets or walking through the park are, one can practically feel the city re-emerging from lockdowns and its refreshing. Through frank and sometimes difficult (and sometimes funny) conversations, we join Roger for his own journey of discovery, all culminating in finally breaking through his writer's block and sitting down to craft the story he's been trying to tell. Love, Brooklyn is a gentle but meaningful film, one unafraid to reflect on a tenuous moment for us all. (Lisa Trifone)
Magic Farm
An American crew from an online news magazine series plans a trip to Argentina, where they have been promised they can make a profile of a unique local musician. But they end up in the wrong country, and the team scrambles to find something worthwhile in this part of the world to shoot a piece about. In the process, they become close to some of the locals and eventually decide it might be okay to fabricate a story so they don’t all get fired for being inept. And in the background of this entire ordeal, there’s a genuine health crisis happening that no one seems to acknowledge.
Despite this set up, writer/director Amalia Ulman’s (El Planeta) Magic Farm feels hollow and feather light in terms of its substance. But thanks to nuanced performances by the show’s host (played by Chloë Sevigny) and her right-hand men (Alex Wolff and Simon Rex), the film has more than a few big laughs as cultures clash as the production team are revealed to be mostly idiots.
There are also not-so-veiled criticisms of media exploitation and the inability of this American crew to care much about this culture’s true worth, but none of those critiques feel especially pointed, instead going for a more playful and awkward vibe than outright social commentary. Magic Farm isn’t a terrible movie by any stretch, and the local actors are a delight to watch work with the Americans, bringing much-need vibrancy to the proceedings. I just wish the movie didn’t pull its punches at every turn. (Steve Prokopy)
Selena y Los Dinos
As a child of the late '80s and early '90s, I didn't think I needed to see a documentary about Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the wildly popular and Grammy-winning Tejano singer who was just about to make her much-deserved crossover into American pop music when she was gunned down by an unstable fan-turned-employee in 1995. I didn't need to see the film because, I presumed, because, well, I'd lived it. That, and there's the 1997 Jennifer Lopez vehicle Selena, with its uncanny ensemble casting that for nearly 30 years has stood as the definitive chronicle of the singer's heart and talent.
Directed by Isabel Castro, Selena y Los Dinos, however, is a welcome and accomplished addition to the artist's legacy, a documentary that makes many smart choices as it recounts the woman's life, rise to stardom and untimely death. Chief among them is Castro's choice to, as far as I recall, never show Yolanda Saldivar, let alone spend any real time whatsoever on that small, tragic portion of an otherwise full and well-lived life. Instead, the film spends most of its nearly two-hour runtime laser focused on Selena herself, recounting her life through a wealth of archival footage (the film recently received a Special Jury mention from Sundance for just this effort) and interviews with those closest to her, including her mother, Marcella, her father, Abe, her siblings (and bandmates), AB III and Suzette, and her husband, Chris Perez.
Through their stories and the rich footage that exists of a life lived on stage and in front of the camera, Selena comes as close to being brought back to life as a film can manage. We watch her grow from a shy child pushed in front of a microphone by a father wanting to provide for his family to a shy but determined young woman who isn't terribly confident in her Spanish but certainly knows her own mind. As the crowds grow bigger and the band's popularity increases, Castro's film reminds us that all the success came with plenty of struggle but plenty to celebrate, too, like when Suzette recounts Selena's elopement with Perez, saying how happy she is that her sister got to experience being a wife and being in love. Hindsight.
News broke recently that Sundance had to remove Selena y Los Dinos from its online viewing portal; it seems too many rabid fans of the late singer were pirating clips from the film and publishing them on social media. It's a testament to Selena's enduring influence and the value of a film as well made as this one. (Lisa Trifone)
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