Alison Brie in Horse Girl and Riley Keough and Taylour Paige in Zola . Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Courtesy of Sundance Institute Every year a whole slab of the movie industry hauls itself off to a small ski town in Utah for the Sundance Film Festival — a celebration of indie film that, for years now, has been more star-studded than scrappy. Still, the possibility for out-of-the-blue discoveries keeps Sundance exciting and worth the trek.
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets Brothers Bill and Turner Ross have a sense of place that’s unrivaled. Their captivating first film, 45365, was a portrait of their hometown of Sidney, Ohio, that seemed to be shot from everywhere at once, their camera moving with impossible ease from barbershop chats to family squabbles to a ride at the state fair. They’ve gone on to make documentaries about New Orleans and the border towns of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras .
Downhill Can a Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus–starring American remake of the deliciously tense Swedish marital comedy-drama Force Majeure work? The key will be not just whether directors Jim Rash and Nat Faxon can find a way to translate the uniquely Scandinavian awkwardness of Ruben Östlund’s original — about a family thrown into disarray when dad privileges his own safety during a near-avalanche — but also whether audiences will buy Ferrell and Louis-Dreyfus in roles that skirt...
La Llorona This horror movie from Guatemalan filmmaker Jayro Bustamante intertwines the atrocities of the Mayan genocide with the folktale of the weeping woman. A retired general keeps hearing the sound of someone unseen crying at night — maybe something supernatural, or maybe a symptom of his escalating Alzheimer’s. But far more disturbing than the possibility of a spectral presence in the house are the details that emerge from his ongoing trial for his brutality against indigenous communities.
The Nest It’s been nine years since filmmaker Sean Durkin’s splashy debut Martha Marcy May Marlene, which gave Elizabeth Olsen her breakout role as a young woman on the run from a cult. In the time since, Durkin’s kept relatively quiet, save for his work on the Channel 4 miniseries Southcliffe. All of which makes the stakes high for The Nest, a thriller and critique about 1980s materialism that follows a transatlantic family as they relocate from the U.S. to the U.K.
V excited to check out Horse Girl!