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Sundance unleashed a baffling mess last week with the satire “Landscape with Invisible Hand,” the latest movie from “Thoroughbreds” director Cory Finley. For his third project, he invests a lot of time and care into a story about existence after an alien invasion, which features a lot of funhouse reflections on human life. But the…

Andrew Bowser is a filmmaker who deeply commits to his creations, and I suspect that will help his budding career as a writer/director/editor/actor. Take his hilarious and impressive Midnight movie “Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls,” a handmade horror gem that centers Bowser’s geeky occultist character Onyx. Bowser has been working on Onyx…

Trauma has long been a theme of independent cinema—it doesn’t cost a lot of money to tell stories of human resilience. And so it makes sense that a festival like Sundance would have a large selection of what could be called depressing cinema. However, “depressing” is often a more complex descriptor that it sounds. Two…

“Kokomo City,” an award-winning documentary from the festival’s NEXT section pulls off an impressive feat in getting us to better understand the experience of the four Black trans women sex workers it follows. There is no greater plot to this movie, but it doesn’t need it: “Kokomo City” is a raucous compilation of charismatic storytellers gathered in the most lively…

Director Michael Jacobs, now 67 years old, adapted his 1978 play for “Maybe I Do.” The title’s contradiction between the tentative and the declarative reflects the different views on love and marriage represented by three couples: a young woman (Emma Roberts) who wants to marry a boyfriend (Luke Bracey) who is not ready to commit. Her…