That was Derek Cianfrance’s “Blue Valentine.” IFP awarded the $1 million grant in 2006, eight years after he completed his acclaimed Sundance debut “Brother Tied.” Marder attended the IFP lunch celebrating Cianfrance’s prize, watching with keen interest; he’d recently quit a career in catering to direct his own debut, the documentary “Loot.” As he watched Cianfrance hold a giant check from the stage, Marder marveled at the patience and deliberation of the other man’s approach....

Hosted with brio by married couple Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman, the 37th Independent Spirit Awards aired live on IFC and the IFC app, and streamed on AMC+. “They’re not going to your movies,” warned Offerman of the blockbuster-obsessed audiences the studios are ever trying to court. But the attendees, while distressed about the state of the world and the war in Ukraine, were generally upbeat about the state of the industry, as streamers and distributors are hungry for product and a maw for fresh content needs to be fed....

King proved his point by singling out CBS’ three-season adaptation of “Under the Dome” as an example of the wrong way to adapt his work, explaining, “‘Under the Dome’ was one I felt like went entirely off the rails because the people are doing things that don’t seem realistic. One thing that killed me was you never hear the sound of a generator anywhere. The electric power is fine. Everything looks clean....

Peele is also producing his hush-hush followup to “Get Out” and “Us” with Ian Cooper through his Monkeypaw Productions’ exclusive five-year deal at Universal Pictures. As previously announced, “Akeelah and the Bee” and “Hustlers” star Keke Palmer will play the female lead in the film, opposite Yeun. Also previously announced, “Get Out” Daniel Kaluuya is in talks to re-team with Peele for the upcoming film also. Kaluuya is up for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar this year for “Judas and the Black Messiah....

The debut from Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, who has been the drummer of hip-hop band The Roots for over three decades, serves up a different slice of music history in the pivotal year of 1969. During the same summer as Woodstock, a different music festival took place 100 miles away. More than 300,000 people attended the summer concert series known as the Harlem Cultural Festival. It was filmed, but after that summer, the footage sat in a basement for 50 years....

She will also lead the Documentary Film Program’s team, including labs director Feeley and film fund director Hajnal Molnar-Szakacs. She will report to the Institute’s executive director, Keri Putnam. Lozano is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist, and lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She joins the Institute from the International Documentary Association’s Enterprise Documentary Fund; she co-founded and oversaw the program, which supported dozens of filmmakers over the last four years, with an emphasis on journalistic rigor, diversity, and inclusion....

The 2021 Sundance Film Festival was an abbreviated event that unfolded largely online. The seven-day program included 73 features, 50 shorts, four Indie Series, 23 talks and events, a New Frontier section with 14 projects, as well as screenings on 40 satellite screens run by 20 cinemas and organizations around the country. Participants watched from over 120 countries and in all 50 states, plus Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and the U....

“Tenet” held off two significant new PVOD entries from Universal and Focus, “News of the World” and “Promising Young Woman.” Paul Greengrass’ Tom Hanks western led Apple TV for three days and placed second to “Tenet” at Google Play over the weekend (before falling a notch at each, respectively). This comes as Universal’s “The Croods: A New Age” continues its strong presence at $19.99. “News” is #1 at FandangoNow, with “Promising” at #3 on their PVOD-dominated list....

It set me up for a lifetime of appreciating high drama, grand spectacle — and the unlikely comedic potential of cannibalism. As last year’s Zoom-ified 90th birthday celebration for Sondheim proved, performing his songs is no small task. Numbers like “Send in The Clowns,” “Ladies Who Lunch,” and “Being Alive” are five-act plays in and of themselves, and as such have been interpreted and re-interpreted by every musical theater performer worth the price of a Broadway ticket....

This year’s release calendar has been so loaded with feature-length wonders, many of which push the boundaries of art form, that even as we head straight into the belly of the “awards season” beast, our usual edict remains intact: Anyone who thinks this has been a bad year for movies simply hasn’t seen enough of them. And there are only more goodies to come. Our list of the best movies of the year so far follows the same basic rules: In order to qualify, a film must have been released in North American theaters for at least a week or on a VOD platform in the same territory....

But lists, especially Top 10 lists, are also a gift. Not only do they provide an excuse to look back and organize your thoughts on the year that was, but they help audiences find more, better TV — whether it’s by discovering diamonds in the rough or giving hastily labeled pebbles a second look. The ubiquity of Top 10 lists also allows review aggregators to compile a somewhat definitive critics’ list, expanding the number of series in consideration by the number of critics with varying tastes, time, and voices....

The third film in a disaster trilogy that began with “The Wave” flowing seamlessly into “The Quake,” a fake documentary launches “The Burning Sea.” An older oil man, living in a cabin, wistfully recalls the country’s energy legacy: Footage from the 1980s of craned rigs, projectile plumes of oil, and birds covered in the noxious black liquid stitch a montage. It was dangerous, but everyone made money, he gleefully recounts, while acknowledging how a persistent race against “a risk of undesirable incidents” lived in the back of the country’s consciousness....

“I never drank alone before rehab,” cracks Hildy Good (Sigourney Weaver), a divorced, 60-year-old real estate agent whose façade of grace and stability is crumbling even faster than that of the quaint Massachusetts harbor town where her family has lived since the days of the Salem witch trials; what’s happening to Wendover isn’t what you’d call “gentrification,” but the influx of chain businesses and white-collar types buying up all the colonial houses has made the place a shell of what it used to be....

Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones were holed up in their Los Angeles home last spring, despairing about the pandemic, when they got an idea: What if they channeled their feelings into a story that showcased this surreal moment? The film that emerged was “How It Ends,” a witty comedy that follows a woman (Lister-Jones) and her younger self (Cailee Spaeny) during their last day on Earth before the apocalypse. Premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the film was shot in early summer under strict COVID-19 protocols, and the result is an impressive snapshot of our time — both in terms of narrative relevancy and nimble, pandemic-friendly filmmaking....

The sad fact that Guantanamo Bay is still open would be enough to emboss “The Mauritanian” with enough clear relevance, but — at a time when so many in our government are adhering to the Constitution with all the reverence of an Ikea instruction manual — the movie’s triple-underlined insistence that American exceptionalism can’t survive exceptions should land with the righteous fury of our better angels screaming at us from the heavens....

At Netflix, “Uncharted” is #1 and leads several in-house productions including “The Gray Man.” Its $200 million investment stands at #5 in its third week. Despite (or because of?) six months of theatrical play (and $149 million gross), as well as extensive VOD availability, the early-year hit starring Tom Holland may have a longer stay at the top than Netflix originals. Google Play, which tends to lag several days behind iTunes, still has Universal’s “Jurassic World: Dominion” ($19....

Joe Russo told Rolling Stone that after watching The Weeknd’s Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2021, he saw movie potential. The Weeknd aka Abel Makkonen Tesfaye is also starring in upcoming HBO series “The Idol,” which he co-created with fellow executive producers “Euphoria” showrunner Sam Levinson and Reza Fahim. “I’d love to do a musical. In fact, we were talking to a few contemporary artists including The Weeknd about trying to get a musical off the ground,” Joe Russo teased....

The biggest problem with Pandemic Cinema — an emergent sub-genre largely defined by well-meaning dramas in which famous actors and/or opportunistic up-and-comers struggle with Zoom calls, sterilize their groceries, and otherwise memorialize the morbid tedium of the last 18 months — is that these movies are so hellbent on making us feel seen that they don’t have much to show us in return. Star-studded films such as “Locked Down” and “Together” and festival indies like “The End of Us” all strive to consecrate the surreality of love during the time of COVID, but they’re invariably overwhelmed by the sheer weight of their signifiers....

The intermission comes to a jolting finale with “X,” West’s A24-produced midnight movie that makes up for missed time. The ‘70s-set story follows a ragtag group of pornographic filmmakers and their cast as they head to a remote farmhouse to shoot their latest project, only to find themselves at the mercy of a psychotic older couple. Mia Goth does double duty as both a castmember for the production and, under tremendous and disturbing makeup, one of the nightmarish assailants....