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Enough Said is truly a bittersweet movie for anyone who loves bears. Hollywood’s finest big, hairy, handsome man—gone far too soon at age 51—proves that he could’ve been the next great romantic comedy leading man in this, his final role. Sans Joisey accent, James Gandolfini oozes sensitivity and warmth as Albert, a divorced dad pre-paring to send his daughter to college while starting a new relationship. Refreshingly, his match is the age-appropriate Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who is also divorced and struggling with a soon-to-be-empty nest....

While there’s nothing unusual about seeing a teenager trying to break free of the unindividuated and invisible state of childhood, the way in which it unfolds in Eliza Hittman’s debut feature is deeply uncomfortable. Lila (Gina Piersanti) first appears on a Rockaway beach, her face Kabuki-white with sunblock, trailing like a ghost behind her older, heavily made-up friend Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni) and Chiara’s boyfriend Patrick (Jesse Cordasco). She observes their sassy-to-passive-aggressive flirting and tales of sexual exploration, silently wishing she had the same thing for herself....

We open on an act of kindness: a woman at a bus stop gives a shy deaf boy detailed directions to his destination. It will be the only instance of generosity in the film. Immediately upon arriving at the grim boarding school for the deaf that serves as the main setting for The Tribe—Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s take-notice debut feature—Sergey (Grygory Fesenko) is hurled into a pit of abuse, criminality, and bone-deep misanthropy....

Doc of the Dead As its inspiration, The Shining will most likely always be the face of the fest (next year: hedge maze?), but zombies were this edition’s guests of honor. (Note: even scarier than The Shining twins are zombie Shining twins silently greeting audiences as they exit the theater!) And kicking off the festivities was a screening of the hugely entertaining Doc of the Dead, the third part in a pop-culture trilogy by Alexandre O....

Don’t miss our special Sundance episodes of the Film Comment Podcast starting with a preview episode available tomorrow morning, and check back over the next week and a half for informed discussions of festival highlights and ahead-of-the-curve coverage from Utah from our correspondents. U.S. Dramatic Competition Hannah Pearl Utt, Before You Know It Cast: Alec Baldwin, Mandy Patinkin, Judith Light Jason Orley, Big Time Adolescence Cast: Colson Baker, Jon Cryer, Pete Davidson Paul Downs Colaizzo, Brittany Runs a Marathon Cast: Jillian Bell, Michaela Watkins, Lil Rel Howery Chinonye Chukwu, Clemency Cast: Alfre Woodard, Wendell Pierce Lulu Wang, The Farewell Cast: Awkwafina, Tzi Ma Minhal Baig, Hala Cast: Geraldine Viswanathan, Jack Kilmer, Anna Chlumsky Alma Har’el, Honey Boy Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges, Maika Monroe Debra Eisenstadt, Imaginary Order Cast: Wendi McLendon-Covey Joe Talbot, The Last Black Man in San Francisco Website Cast: Danny Glover, Tichina Arnold, Thora Birch, Mike Epps, Finn Wittrock Julius Onah, Luce Cast: Naomi Watts, Octavia Spencer, Tim Roth, Kelvin Harrison Jr....

If last year’s Obvious Child was tagged as an abortion comedy, Grandma might be simplistically summarized as an abortion road movie. Pregnant and too afraid to go to her own mother, Sage (Julia Garner) shows up on her grandmother’s doorstep in Los Angeles needing $600 for the procedure she’s already scheduled. But Elle is flat broke: she’s drained her savings paying off hospital bills (her partner of 38 years has recently passed away due to illness) and chopped up her credit cards to make the decorative mobile that hangs on her front porch....

A Girl at My Door Perhaps one of the most unconventional actresses working today, from the time she starred in Bong Joon-ho’s Barking Dogs Never Bite (00), dashing around an apartment complex trying to save pups, she’s excelled at portraying people who live in their own inner reality while fully capable of taking (often strenuous) action in the real world. Bae made her debut in the horror film The Ring Virus (99) before Bong cast her in his first feature....

On today’s episode, FC co-editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are joined by curator and critic Antoine Thirion and critic (and former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma) Jean-Michel Frodon to discuss some recent viewings from the festival’s mid-point: Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy, Bas Devos’s Here, Zhang Lu’s The Shadowless Tower, John Trengove’s Manodrome, Dustin Guy-Defa’s The Adults, Margarethe von Trotta’s Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert, and Manthia Diawara’s AI: African Intelligence....

Films discussed: Zardoz, Harlem Nights, Intolerance, Interiors, Southland Tales, Donnie Darko, The Hateful Eight, Streets of Fire, Hair, One From the Heart, Children of Men, Millennium Mambo, Fences, Something Borrowed Listen/Subscribe:

A couple days ago, before the festival kicked off, FC co-deputy editor Devika Girish attended the opening conference of the Berlin Critics’ Week—an autonomous sidebar to the Berlinale, organized independently by a collective of German critics, including Amos Borchert, Elena Friedrich, Petra Palmer, and Dennis Vetter. The topic of the conference was “Cinema of Care – Who Looks After Film Culture?,” which included a panel discussion moderated by Devika, and featuring a stellar lineup of guests: curators Abby Sun and Marek Hovorka, and the filmmaker Claire Denis....

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Check back over the next week and a half for updates on all the highlights from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

To kick things off, Film Comment Co-Editor Devika Girish invited critics Lovia Gyarkye (The Hollywood Reporter) and Guy Lodge (Variety) to chat about the films we caught during the first few days of the fest—including Freaky Tales, Handling the Undead, Skywalker: A Love Story, Girls State, God Save Texas: Hometown Prison, and Ghostlight. Catch up on all of our Sundance 2024 coverage here.