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Axios
08-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
5 Sundance Film Festival flicks we loved this year
It's a wrap on the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and we're highlighting our favorite films. How to watch: A few of these films will soon hit theaters or streaming platforms. " The Alabama Solution" The harrowing documentary details allegations of horrifying conditions in Alabama's state prison system. Inmates risked their lives to secretly capture footage, working with the film's directors, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman. What they're saying:"What we learned in making the film is just how secretive the prison system is," Jarecki told a Salt Lake City audience. "We're hoping the film pulls back the veil of secrecy." What's next: The documentary will stream on Max. " Together" Screams, laughter and gasps filled the theater during this romantic horror and comedy starring real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie. The intrigue: The gory movie follows a couple on the rocks who move to a quiet town and encounter a supernatural force that takes control of their bodies. By the numbers: The film's worldwide rights sold to Neon for over $15 million after an aggressive bidding war, Deadline reported. " Omaha" Filmed in Utah by local director Cole Webley, the family drama centers around a father who takes his two children on an unexpected road trip amid tragedy. " It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley" The documentary explores the life of the late, angel-voiced musician Jeff Buckley, recounted by the women who loved him. Trigger warning: It will be difficult to keep your eyes dry by the end of the film. " Didn't Die" The black and white dry horror-comedy is told from the perspective of a podcaster and her family who survive a zombie apocalypse. What they're saying: "Writer-director Meera Menon's low-budget thriller is an homage to zombie pioneer George Romero and a moving drama about the emotional toll of living through civilizational crisis," per the film's description.
New York Times
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
At Sundance, a Sense of Uprooting Onscreen and Off
If a festival can be summed up in one word, then the word for this year's Sundance Film Festival is weird. That was the adjective that drifted through my mind as I circled in and out of screenings, chatted with other attendees and scanned local headlines. Weird could apply to some of the selections in the event, which ends Sunday. But it wasn't so much the lineup that struck many us, it was the festival, the pre-eminent American showcase for U.S. independent cinema and beyond. The vibe felt off, we murmured, the energy muted. For good reason, too. The fires in Los Angeles County were still burning when Sundance opened on Jan. 23. Park City, Utah, is a long way from the Hollywood sign, but Sundance and the mainstream industry have always been codependents, and when the mainstream feels unsettled, you can feel the anxiety in the air. Making matters worse is that the conflagration in California is just the latest crisis facing the movie world, which continues to grapple with the aftershocks of the pandemic and back-to-back strikes, along with its self-inflicted wounds. Adding to this Great Movieland Unsettlement is Sundance's search for a new home. Last year, the festival announced that it was exploring alternatives to Park City, where it has been held for decades. Among the stated reasons is that the event has outgrown the resort town, which has a population of just over 8,200 and an infrastructure that remains ill-equipped to handle such a large annual inundation. Every year, tens of thousands of movie lovers swarm into Park City, straining resources and local patience. Now, after a search, Sundance has settled on three alternatives: Cincinnati; Boulder, Colo.; and Salt Lake City, where the festival already screens movies, with some events remaining in Park City. Questions about where Sundance will land percolated throughout this year's event, which features the usual great and good, bad and blah selections. Among the standouts is Geeta Gandbhir's documentary 'The Perfect Neighbor,' which tracks how friction between a white woman and her multiracial neighbors in Florida turned progressively heated and then horrifyingly lethal. Consisting largely of imagery culled from police body cameras and interrogation interviews, it offers up a horrifying look at everyday racial animus and stand-your-ground laws. It also underscores, as the white woman makes one 911 call after another, that there's nothing funny about the prejudices and pathologies of a so-called Karen. The documentary 'The Alabama Solution,' from Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, makes similarly effective and sustained use of nontraditional source material. In this case, most of the visuals in 'Alabama' consist of cellphone videos that were surreptitiously shot by inmates documenting the gruesome conditions of Alabama's notoriously deficient prison system, as well as their own gutsy efforts to improve them. Like the body-cam material in 'The Perfect Neighbor,' the cellphone images in 'Alabama' are visually degraded yet prove hauntingly powerful because they're familiar and intimate. When the camera shakes as it scans a blood-slicked floor, it is partly because the inmate capturing this terrible scene is, too. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Yahoo
‘The Alabama Solution' Review: ‘Jinx' Filmmakers' New Doc Is the Bloody Sunday of Inmate Rights and Prison Reform
'Incarcerated men defy the odds to expose a cover-up in America's deadliest prison system,' reads the logline for the HBO-backed documentary 'The Alabama Solution.' But that does not begin to describe this powerful and extremely necessary call-to-action. Over the last decade, incarcerated men in Alabama prisons have been fighting to bring recognition to corruption and inhumane treatment. Thousands of men have died in prison, many at the hands of correctional officers and others of overdoses on drugs allegedly supplied by correctional officers. The death toll is so high that the Alabama Department of Corrections is widely regarded as the deadliest prison system in the United States. With the ADOC also supplying prison labor to private corporations like Walmart, Hyundai, and McDonald's, accusations of modern-day slavery have also followed. Veteran Emmy, Peabody and Sundance-winning filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, known for his 12-part HBO series 'The Jinx' that led to Robert Durst's arrest and murder conviction, and Charlotte Kaufman, who has worked with Jarecki for the last six years, amplify the efforts of these prisoners in the shocking documentary 'The Alabama Solution.' As co-directors and co-producers, they have wisely decided to cull together a film that allows the inmates to tell their own stories through their cell phone footage, largely spanning from 2016 to 2020. Footage of inhumane prison conditions from overcrowding, pools of blood from assaults by corrections officers, overdoses from drugs supplied by that same personnel and body bags of those who didn't make it reveal an overall prison culture that includes inmate abuse, suppression, intimidation and retaliation. Free Alabama Movement (F.A.M.) members, many of whom have already served more than 20 years, also share their own testimonies. At the center are Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, also known as Kinetik Justice. Council, who is a target as the main leader of the movement, frequently speaks while in solitary confinement. Trained to use their minds and nonviolent practices by incarcerated civil rights activists who participated in the Selma marches, Council and Ray are disciplined and dedicated leaders. Council, a former drug dealer, is a master organizer who inspires people to stand up and unify to bring about change. Black inmates are not Alabama's only victims. The beating death of a white man — the 35-year-old Steven Davis — figures prominently in the doc, especially since ADOC chooses to send press releases to the news media over speaking directly to his mother Sandy Ray. As the white male attorney retained by family calls inmates to inquire about specifics around Davis' death, the retaliatory measures the staff takes against the cooperating inmates are highly disturbing. Top Alabama officials, from Governor Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall down, respond defensively to a DOJ investigation. Ivey insists that there is 'an Alabama solution,' but that solution largely fails to address the issues being flagged and, instead, includes a tone-deaf $900 million proposal. State leaders, who are all white, refuse to admit any major wrongdoing, even as inmate death rates continue at alarming rates. They also refuse to hold any of their staff accountable. Accusations of slave labor practices grow more disturbing as it's revealed that inmates who have served decades without incident are denied parole. These same men who are supposedly too dangerous to the public to be released are somehow fit enough to work in private companies and public Alabama facilities where they interface with the public while generating state revenue in the hundreds of millions. It doesn't sit right. Cell phone footage going inside the nearly month-long work stoppage by the inmates in retaliation, from organization to execution, is both inspiring and crushing, particularly as the realization of just how sinister the institutions can be hits. Just as news cameras capturing the shocking events of Bloody Sunday in 1965 helped widen support for the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-led Civil Rights Movement, 'The Alabama Solution,' with its unprecedented raw and jaw-dropping footage of inhumane prison practices, can galvanize the public behind inmate rights and the critical need for criminal justice reform. Challenging the foundation of a 'law and order' culture is not easy, but hopefully 'The Alabama Solution' shows that mass incarceration is not the way to build a strong nation, and that the real fight is between the haves and the have-nots, those in power against the powerless. The post 'The Alabama Solution' Review: 'Jinx' Filmmakers' New Doc Is the Bloody Sunday of Inmate Rights and Prison Reform appeared first on TheWrap.
Washington Post
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
With leaked footage from the inside, Sundance doc shows horrifying conditions in Alabama prisons
PARK CITY, Utah — Incarcerated men in the Alabama prison system risked their safety to feed shocking footage of their horrifying living conditions to a pair of documentary filmmakers. The result is 'The Alabama Solution,' which premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman became interested in Alabama prisons in 2019. Jarecki, the filmmaker behind 'The Jinx' and 'Capturing the Friedmans,' and Kaufman first gained access to the restricted grounds through a visit with a chaplain during a revival meeting held in the prison yards. There men pulled them aside and whispered shocking stories about the reality of life inside: forced labor, drugs, violence, intimidation, retaliation and the undisclosed truths behind many prisoner deaths.
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Alabama Solution' Review: Powerful New Doc From ‘The Jinx' Duo Investigates Injustices in Alabama Prisons
Even if the documentary weren't premiering at a moment when key aspects of the federal government are being dismantled seemingly at random, the title of Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman's The Alabama Solution would sound ominous. The title, which comes equipped with 'Final Solution' resonances, refers to a promise or threat by Alabama Governor Kay Ivey that if there are problems in the Alabama prison system, they're an Alabama problem and must have an Alabama solution. Which is a transparent way of saying, 'Butt out' to the Department of Justice and an equally transparent way of saying, 'Nah, nothing is going to change.' More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Luz' Review: Isabelle Huppert in a Virtual Reality Drama Whose Catchy Visuals Compensate for a Lackluster Plot Dave Franco, Alison Brie Body Horror 'Together' Lands at Neon 'Last Days' Review: Justin Lin Returns to Indies With a Solid Drama About a Misguided Missionary The reality, of course, is that The Alabama Solution makes clear that the problems captured in the documentary aren't simply 'Alabama problems.' And although I'm not sure the doc is nearly as effective at insinuating what solutions might be, it's a film precision-designed to stoke sadness and outrage, and it achieves that goal thoroughly. The HBO production begins in 2019 as the filmmakers attend a religious revival in the yard at Easterling Correctional Facility in Southeast Alabama. There's music and BBQ and everybody looks happy and full of hope and community. Slowly, one prisoner after another begins to ask to speak to the directors in private, trying to emphasize how every aspect of the revival is public-facing propaganda. This isn't surprising, obviously, but as they hear stories of beatings and stabbings and worse, the directors become curious. The efforts by prisoners to reach out continue even after filming is shut down at the end of the revival, prompting a documentary about the difference between what the Alabama carceral system wants people to see and what prisoners need people to know — and how far they're willing to go to bring the truth to light. There are, it turns out, optimistic communities within Easterling and the other Alabama prisons. They're the secret cabals of inmates who have dedicated themselves to pushing back against the inhumanity of institutions that are at 200 percent inmate capacity with 1/3rd of the necessary staff, where punishment is the only objective and rehabilitation isn't even a consideration. They're pushing for change. Knowing that they wouldn't be welcome at the prison for a non-propaganda film, the directors begin seeking answers outside while collaborating with the inmates on the inside. The inmates are prepared to film using purloined cell phones, even knowing that the consequences for being caught could range from solitary confinement to unregulated violence meted out by guards, abetted by prisoners who know that their only chance at parole is playing along and covering up. After the innocuous and even uplifting opening, The Alabama Solution quickly becomes a nightmare of a documentary, as these citizen documentarians provide the directors with glimpses of sweltering, airless buildings, bloodstained cellblock floors and one distressing story after another. The documentary becomes a two-tiered crusade. On the inside, we have activists like Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, who have spent years of their padded sentences in solitary while using the rest of the time to learn about the law and teach fellow inmates, which has made them targets for additional punitive measures. They learned under the guidance of an older generation of inmates, many of whom were veterans of the Civil Rights Movement; their work is a triumph of inherited activism, and underlines how the racial power imbalances in Alabama are part of the state's ongoing traditions, dating back to slavery. This culminates in an attempted statewide inmate strike. On the outside, the directors follow a tip from Melvin to investigate the beating and death of a prisoner under decidedly suspicious circumstances. They follow the deceased inmate's grieving mother and crusading lawyer in search of justice at exactly the moment that the DoJ issues a report criticizing Alabama prisons. The institutions begin to push back. With Melvin and Robert Earl, the directors have a pair of reflective heroes whose mission to chronicle and disseminate information from the prison adds suspense, as we watch them filming in darkened corners and underneath blankets, always monitoring for signals warning them about approaching guards. They aren't there for a 'wrongfully convicted' storyline. They're seeking human empathy and nothing more. Knowing that some viewers — not, realistically, the viewers who will ever actually see this movie — will resist invocations of mercy for criminals, they balance the emotional and passionate personal narratives with incontestable facts. They concentrate on details like the drug rehabilitation wing of the hospital that, despite federal funding, has none of the programs or infrastructure to show where the money is going; or the scary deposition testimony from a wholly unapologetic guard accused of murder; or a brief and soulless interview with one of Alabama's chief legal officials, whose cold evasion is unsettling. Even if you already have internalized the argument that The Alabama Solution is building, it's easy to appreciate the care with which the argument is being built. Filmmakers have been telling comparable stories for years — see Liz Garbus and Jonathan Stack's The Farm: Angola, USA, or Ava DuVernay's 13th, among many others — and the futility is baked in. This is not like Jarecki's The Jinx (Kaufman produced the second season), where it might have been possible to get justice as the destination of the storytelling process. The Alabama Solution is difficult to watch, and impossible to watch without escalating anger. There isn't easy catharsis or an easy non-Alabama solution, but it's impossible to deny that something better must be done. Best of The Hollywood Reporter The Best Anti-Fascist Films of All Time Dinosaurs, Zombies and More 'Wicked': The Most Anticipated Movies of 2025 From 'A Complete Unknown' to 'Selena' to 'Ray': 33 Notable Music Biopics
