Sundance 2024 Reviews: ‘Ponyboi,’ ‘Love Me’ and ‘Thelma’
I’ve hit the slopes of Sundance and by slopes I mean the comfort of my living room as the online component of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival has kicked off and where I’ll begin my Sundance 2024 review diary with capsule thoughts on Ponyboi, Love Me and Thelma.
Ponyboi (Esteban Arango)
It’s Valentine’s Day 2002, a post-9/11 world of Motorola flip phones and pre-social media explosion and Ponyboi (breakout star River Gallo, who also wrote the script) is a young Latinx intersex sex worker looking for love in all the wrong places. Splitting time between sweeping floors at the Fluff N’ Stuff laundromat, turning tricks at New Jersey truck stops and selling crystal meth for his best friend’s boyfriend who he’s fooling around with on the side, things are exactly where they thought they’d be for Ponyboi. Told over the course of 24 hours, Esteban Arango takes us on a Zola-esque wild ride that, for what it lacks in plot originality, more than makes up for with a vibrant pace, Cristobal Tapia De Veer’s lush and dreamy score and a look that’s both saturated in wonder and grainy in rawness thanks to Ed Wu’s cinematography. Gallo and best gal pal Angel (Victoria Pedretti) are a fun duo, comparing each other’s lawng nails and French tips that would make Barbra Streisand in The Prince of Tides gasp and Dylan O’Brien as Angel’s boyfriend and soon to be baby daddy Vinnie, who is brilliant and terrifying here, playing far against type as a brutal, savage dealer. Add in a stolen suitcase of mob money and Murray Bartlett as a knight in shining white cowboy hat singing Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” and you have a recipe for a unique take on the crime thriller, an exciting perspective and one that balances farce with heart in mostly the right measures.
Grade: B
Ponyboi debuted in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
Love Me (Sam & Andy Zuchero)
Love Me begins 5 billion years ago as we watch the Earth forming, created, destroyed by a meteor, coming back to Earth as we know it then decimated once again, bringing us to the current year of 2586 A.D. where there are no more humans. Cute little smart buoy sb350 is frozen in the ice off of what used to be New York City, trying to form words as she sees a satellite overhead making its rounds looking for human life forms. Finally being able to blurt out ‘welcome’ to the satellite stops it in its tracks. That these two sentient machines are voiced by Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun are as good as you can get but they end up being one of the few saving graces of the film, a largely unoriginal and lethargic mishmash of WALL-E, Her, Good Night Oppy and the SIMs. After an endearing byte cute in which the buoy creates an online persona for herself stolen from a social influencer named Deja (get it) and names herself ME and in the human form of Stewart to befriend the satellite (whom she nicknames IAM and is in the form of Deja’s boyfriend Liam) the two begin an exchange of information. While this creates several funny moments like ME trying to navigate an ‘I’m not a robot’ checkbox and Sir Richard Attenborough narrating a video on what used to Earth, the steam runs out fast on ideas that become repetitive and stagnant one-note premise on what’s real and what’s fake, and fails at both a clichéd look at influencer culture and the future of AI but it never feels like it’s saying anything remotely groundbreaking about either. Stewart and Yeun don’t really show up in earnest in their human form until the third act, another one billion years in the future (the rest is 2000s era visual effects avatars) and despite only a 92 minute run time it feels like a slog to get there. There’s a wonderful story in Sam and Andy Zuchero’s Love Me somewhere, perhaps as a short instead of a feature, it just needed far fewer trips around the sun to get there.
Grade: C
Love Me debuted in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
Thelma (Josh Margolin)
If you started your elevator pitch for a movie with “so it’s June Squibb on a motorized scooter with a gun” I’d probably tell you to shut up and take my money. Inspired by a real-life experience of writer-director Josh Margolin’s own grandmother, Academy Award nominee June Squibb (Nebraska) plays feisty 93-year old granny Thelma Post, who has a penchant for chatting but less so for internet technology. She has a doting grandson Danny (a very charming Fred Hechinger from The White Lotus), who helps her with emails, ensures she wears her life alert bracelet and watches Mission: Impossible movies as they awe over Tom Cruise’s stunt prowess. One day, Thelma receives a frantic call from someone who says they’re Danny and that they’re in jail and need $10,000 cash sent to a P.O. Box to bail him out. Panicked, Thelma calls Danny but he doesn’t pick up. She calls her daughter, manic therapist Gail (Parker Posey) and rigid, by-the-book son-in-law Alan (Clark Gregg) but no one is available to help or take her to the post office. She scurries around her apartment, grabbing money from dressers, mattresses and shoe boxes and heads on foot to save her grandson. But it’s a scam and Thelma’s family begins whispering about it finally being time to send her to a home. Thelma’s having none of it and with help from her friend Ben (a delightful Richard Roundtree in his last film role) and his brand new motor scooter the two begin an impossible mission to get her money back. June Squibb is absolutely winning as Thelma, full of grit and vulnerability in this gem of a film and Margolin directs with the energy of an action movie that keeps its 97 minute run time full speed ahead.
Grade: B
Thelma debuted in the Premieres section of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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