‘The Persian Version’ Review: Maryam Keshavarz’s Dramedy Lacks Cohesion [Sundance]

Few writers have as much of a hold on adults’ childhood selves as Judy Blume. Even if you’ve never read her books, her impact, especially with her most influential novels decades ago, is felt in how YA fiction is laid out today.

After growing up on a steady diet of “Law & Order: SVU,” Dianey Bermeo wanted to be like Olivia Benson, helping victims of sex crimes by bringing their assailants to justice. She gave up on that dream after police investigators in her college town failed to find the man who she said impersonated an officer and sexually assaulted her.

Roger Ebert once wrote, “just because something is not done anymore doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing,” when describing Norman Jewison’s irrepressible romantic comedy “Only You.” This same sentiment can be applied to Angus MacLachlan’s latest family dramedy, “A Little Prayer,” a welcome throwback to adult-oriented movie fare of yore like “On Golden Pond,” “Fried Green Tomatoes,” or “Passion Fish.

The "Thoroughbreds" and "Bad Education" filmmaker's sci-fi/comedy finds him working on a larger canvas, but to lesser effect.

Brendon (Algee Smith) isn’t a bad kid. An aspiring artist living in Los Angeles, in his last month of high school, the pressures of his daily life, however, are beginning to overwhelm him.

Ira Sachs prefers relationships of the doomed variety — tempestuous passions torn asunder, sometimes by external forces like capitalism, which complicated the search for a home through New York’s cutthroat real estate market in “Love Is Strange” and “Little Men.” His latest film — the sexy, frustrating, loose-yet-compact, altogether irresistible three-hander “Passages” — also concerns property contracts and a homeless protagonist. However, this one’s got nobody but himself to blame for that predicament, fluent as he is in the same toxic strain of amour fou that previously perfumed the air in “Keep the Lights On” and especially Sachs’ debut, “The Delta.” As in that film — also pitched at the admirably humble quotidian scale Sachs hasn’t felt the need to exceed in more than a quarter decade — “Passages” follows a bisexual chaos agent so wrapped up in his own narcissism that he can’t see where his self-exploration ends and insensitivity to those around him begins.

Like most teenagers, Heather (non-binary actor Bobbi Salvör Menuez), a social misfit who lives in a rural town in northern Canada, has a strict midnight curfew to adhere to. But unlike other teenagers, staying out for longer has a much more dangerous effect on her.

Ria Khan (Priya Kansara, sparkling in her feature debut) likes to believe that she’s no ordinary British-Pakistani teenager. Her dreams, for instance, always seem outsized — she doesn’t just want to learn martial arts but rather perfect it so well that she can become a world-class professional stunt woman.

There was a time when it seemed like every movie trailer for every single comedy began with bouncy music and a voice-over artist explaining cheerfully, “[NAME OF PROTAGONIST] had it all!” But at the beginning of Nicole Holofcener’s “You Hurt My Feelings,” Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) does, in fact, seem to have it all: she’s in a long-lasting marriage with a successful therapist, they have a great apartment on the Upper West Side, their 23-year-old son Eliot (Owen Teague) is writing his first play, she teaches writing at the New School, and she’s just finished her second book.

If Jordan Firstman did not exist, it would be necessary for Sebastián Silva to invent him. “Discomfort rooted in class friction” and “the perverse amusement of watching people be annoying” rank high on the list of stalwart indie filmmaker Silva’s favorite recurring themes, and no modern type marries the two quite as handily as the social media influencer that plague of shamelessly promotional non-celebrities who adopt the entitled mindset of fame long before breaking into the industry sector accommodating it.

Heading into the first weekend of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, many filmgoers likely have their schedule tightly planned for what films they are viewing for the next week. If it isn’t there already, one film to add to your schedule is “5 Seasons of Revolution” by Lina.

The "Once" and "Sing Street" filmmaker is back with another testimonial to the transformative power of popular music.

From Jesus’s ripped physique to the Song of Solomon, there’s something about Christian iconography that’s just a little bit sexy. And if you haven’t noticed that yet, you certainly will after seeing “Mamacruz,” the second film from Venezuelan writer-director Patricia Ortega (“Yo, Imposible”).

In Montana’s Big Sky Country, a black cloud hangs over the state’s expansive horizon. It looms above the indigenous residents of the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations and nearby towns in Big Horn County most of all.

While it may seem niche to those outside of Texas, high school mariachi competitions are quite prolific in the Lonestar State. The teams give students a creative outlet, as well as an opportunity to pursue scholarships in college music.

A memory, tinged with aching rawness, emerges in “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” the feature debut by writer/director Raven Jackson. This memory briefly foretells the knotting stream of remembrances that roots our protagonist, Mack (played in these early childhood scenes by a sage Kaylee Nicole Johnson). It begins in 1970, with young Mack’s hands softly holding a fishing reel, its pole stretched across the frame.

There’s crazy, there’s batshit crazy, and then there’s Brandon Cronenberg’s definition of crazy. It’s a crazy that’s impossible to contain and even more impossible to label: a mind-bending neon-lit nightmare bursting at the seams with perverse imagery, an abrasive embrace of the grotesque, and a ravishing explosion of seduction and power.

There’s a popular song in North Korea called “Nothing to Envy.” Lines include, “Who can ever break our strength? / We are not afraid of any storm or stress” and “Our home is the bosom of the Party / We are all brothers and sisters / We envy nothing in the world.” Though they lack running water, indoor plumbing, and basic freedom of thought — to name just a few things — North Koreans are taught to believe that they genuinely have it better than any other country on earth.

In Greek mythology, it holds that for a time, gods and mortals mingled freely, creating demigods whose sole aim was to prove their worth so they might join their celestial kin. For the Greeks, the gods who ruled on mount Olympus formed the idealized version of humans—often possessing super strength to match their perfect physiques.

Spanning three time periods and two continents, “Past Lives,” the directorial debut of Celine Song (“Endlings”), tells the story of two childhood friends and sweethearts pulled apart by time, circumstance, and fate. They come back together and end in a way that might subvert the romantic fantasies of the audience — but this only shows the important roles people play in our lives, even if it’s not what we expected.  READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated Films At The Sundance Film Festival Disembodied voices start us off in “Past Lives,” making guesses at who Nora (Greta Lee), Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), and Arthur (John Magaro) are to each other as they sit at an NYC bar.

Margaret Atwood said it best: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” This age-old discrepancy in the way the two genders experience the world is written both at the initial frame and very heart of Susanna Fogel’s mercurial “Cat Person,” a fiendishly playful relationship-gone-bad quasi-thriller with a sense of humor about its own unknowability.

Starting with early frames that capture one very cold East Coast winter with cozy grain, director William Oldroyd’s gorgeous yet thin-spread drama-thriller “Eileen” looks like the kind of movie one wishes to luxuriate in. Indeed, the masterful “Lady Macbeth” director’s period piece promises to be the cinematic equivalent of a lavish fur coat at first glance, so inviting in its smoky mahogany interiors and mutedly warm color palette that it feels easy to slip into, no questions asked.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Alice Englert’s “Bad Behaviour” is a dirty bomb of a movie, and it almost seems intentionally devised to keep the viewer off-balance. What at first appears a rather obvious send-up of self-help culture turns into a take-no-prisoners assault on narrative expectations and norms, all the while painting a pointed portrait of a truly complicated protagonist, the kind of character whose motivations and intentions are so slippery, you can barely make up your mind about her before she gives you a reason to change it again.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Alice Englert’s “Bad Behaviour” is a dirty bomb of a movie, and it almost seems intentionally devised to keep the viewer off-balance. What at first appears a rather obvious send-up of self-help culture turns into a take-no-prisoners assault on narrative expectations and norms, all the while painting a pointed portrait of a truly complicated protagonist, the kind of character whose motivations and intentions are so slippery, you can barely make up your mind about her before she gives you a reason to change it again.

“From the YouTube sensations…” isn’t exactly the phrase you want to hear going into a film — horror or otherwise. This set-up brings a certain amount of baggage that the audience will be hard-pressed to shake, regardless of the filmmaker’s talent.

PARK CITY – One of the best accomplishments a documentary can pull off is making its audience uncomfortable. Maybe even squirm in their seats a little.

Margaret Atwood said it best: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” This age-old discrepancy in the way the two genders experience the world is written both at the initial frame and very heart of Susanna Fogel’s mercurial “Cat Person,” a fiendishly playful relationship-gone-bad quasi-thriller with a sense of humor about its own unknowability.

Over the past few years, it’s thankfully become more common to find screenings with closed captioning at your local multiplex. Not just theaters that hand out closed captioning devices — which often require another layer of artifice between the audience and the movie — but actual onscreen captions.

You don’t get very far into “5 Seasons of Revolution” before you realize something is off with one of the documentary’s participants. That person is Susu, a friend of the film’s director (simply credited as “Lina”).

“I don’t spend much time thinking,” says 20-something Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), a troubled and displaced Afghan insomniac, to her doctor in the terrific, breakthrough indie “Fremont.” Why? he asks inquisitively. “Too busy with my social life,” she answers, with confidence so cool and so far from the truth, it’s laugh-out-loud comical.

Richard Pryor used to do a bit on the differences between Black and white churches – one that was often revised and revisited by his many imitators in the decades that followed. But one thing he got particularly right, beyond the lameness of the hymns and the restrained quality of the ministers, is the eerie quiet of white churches, the way that the fires of hell and the sins of man can be described in tones barely more threatening than a hot dish recipe.

On second thought, we may have let our collective nostalgia for erotic thrillers get a tad out of hand. Chloe Domont’s “Fair Play” seems, at least at the level of its inception, to be a thought exercise: what would it look like to make something like “Disclosure,” but from the perspective, and with sympathy towards, the Demi Moore character? That Barry Levinson adaptation of a Michael Crichton thriller has aged like a bottle of milk on a radiator, a baffling stew of corporate intrigue, shitty special effects, and spectacularly terrible sexual politics.

On second thought, we may have let our collective nostalgia for erotic thrillers get a tad out of hand. Chloe Domont’s “Fair Play” seems, at least at the level of its inception, to be a thought exercise: what would it look like to make something like “Disclosure,” but from the perspective, and with sympathy towards, the Demi Moore character? That Barry Levinson adaptation of a Michael Crichton thriller has aged like a bottle of milk on a radiator, a baffling stew of corporate intrigue, shitty special effects, and spectacularly terrible sexual politics.

With her breakout turn as a soulful queer rancher in Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women,” Lily Gladstone proved herself to be one of the most unique and affecting performers of the last decade. Although she has worked steadily since it’s ridiculous that it’s taken this long for another role that really allows her tremendous talent to shine.  READ MORE: 25 Most Anticipated Movies At The 2023 Sundance Film Festival Co-written by director Erica Tremblay (“Reservation Dogs”), whose short “Little Chief” also starred Gladstone, and Miciana Alise, the family drama “Fancy Dance” explores the systematic mishandling by the police and the FBI of missing and murdered indigenous women.

In Greek mythology, it holds that for a time, gods and mortals mingled freely, creating demigods whose sole aim was to prove their worth so they might join their celestial kin. For the Greeks, the gods who ruled on mount Olympus formed the idealized version of humans—often possessing super strength to match their perfect physiques.

The prospect of deep-sea mining may seem like a solution to our ever-growing fuel crisis. Polymetallic nodules that sit on the ocean floor are made up of the very type of metals that so-called ‘green’ companies need to build batteries.