Sundance 2026 — Day 10

TUNER (Daniel Roher, USA, 4, 2 stars)

If you didn’t know better, you might think that Dustin Hoffman walked off this film because he realized the script was rubbish, a la Bette Davis in “Wicked Stepmother.” That’s a little harsh (“Tuner” has good things in it), but there’s basically two movies here — a quasi-paternalist occupational story and a crime-caper film — and I didn’t believe anything that happened after Hoffman’s first-act medical emergency put a premature end to the former. The venerable Hoffman runs a piano-tuning business and Leo Woodall plays his apprentice with an uncannily sensitive musical ear but also an allergy to loud noise. Hoffman felt less grating than Alan Arkin in “Little Miss Sunshine,” perhaps because pushiness was always part of his persona. But he plays to the back row in Unfiltered Codger mode, which makes Woodall’s lower-key modesty welcome. That ear is useful for (pre-electronic-lock) safe cracking and Woodall gets semi-coerced into joining a criminal gang (all of whom give terrible performances). It wouldn’t be wrong to call “Tuner” a fairy tale about a man with superhero powers that ruin him, only to regain his soul by losing that power, Woodall has another sweet relationship with a piano student-composer (Havana Rose Liu). There’s elements of “Baby Driver” and “Whiplash,” plus a sound design that cracked the latter film’s aural track up to about 12. But the caper material is under-realized and then becomes risible/unclear in its climax and resolution; and everything Jean Reno does as the maestro is even worse.

TO HOLD A MOUNTAIN (Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazic, Montenegro, 8, 4 stars)

In the remote highlands of Montenegro, a shepherd mother and daughter proudly defend their ancestral mountain from the threat of becoming a NATO military training ground, stirring memories of the violence that shattered their family.

That’s not wrong but IS the kind of logline written to appeal to Sundance’s leftist patrons’ muthoi … here military bad and patriarchy bad. A worthy winner of the World Documentary grand prize, “To Hold a Mountain” is set on Montenegro’s cheese-making Sinjajevina plateau and although the loglines’ two threads are mentioned, “To Hold a Mountain” is mostly an observational portrait of traditional farm life. Three women — a grandmother, a mother and a daughter (though these exact relations get gradually revealed) — live in ways that feel unchanged for a century. Only the daughter’s cellular phone and the presence of her Yugo to head off to college (we never see it) set the film in the present. The three women don’t even have male farmhands and almost do everything by hand, and the presentation of farm life is both lovely and completely unsentimental. When a cow accidentally injures her calf, not only does the calf get taken away in a wheelbarrow the two women can barely handle (the film’s motherhood theme is reflected in the cow’s obstruction efforts), but they determine the calf has to be euthanized. They must use the means available, which is not a ready supply of pentobarbital. Of the three threads — farm life, NATO exercises, memories of a domestic murder — the ratio felt like 75% / 15% / 10%, which is exactly right. And the film shows no interest in the mechanics of the latter two. We learn the outcome of the exercises plan but don’t follow the bureaucratic wrangling, parliamentary votes, etc.; we hear about a restraining order but never see the object, go to court, etc. They’re what intrudes on the stuff of Dasein.

SOUL PATROL (J.M. Harper, USA, 3, 1 1/2 stars)

Wait … this wasn’t a Taylor Hicks biopic?!? More seriously, I’m not gonna say this is just a DEI pic; one can make a great movie about an all-black Long Range Patrol (Special Forces) company during the Vietnam War. I am gonna say that had someone made a film like this that didn’t have the element of race and no opportunity to show footage of “black leaders” Stokely Carmichael and Bobby Seale talk about killing whites / cops / white cops instead … it would not have made one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. I would rather have seen Spike Lee of some other director turn the story of this unit into a fiction feature than have this (mostly) assemblage of talking heads at a reunion. There’s just far too much self-referential throat clearing at the start, including having Ed Emanuel introduced as the author of the book “Soul Patrol.” And frankly, the soldiers here don’t really say much in the current-day interviews and reunion that hasn’t been said in numerous Vietnam films already, and the footage of them in Vietnam is mostly ordinary still photos … nothing revelatory or that dramatic. They do describe one incident in which there’s multiple NVA units around and overrunning them and they never opened fire. One soldier said he thought “Charlie” showed mercy, which is (a) not believable; and (b) not nearly as dramatic in bald description 50 years later as it might’ve been in depiction. (Spike, where are you?!) Director JM Harper does try sone “meh” re-enactments and an expressionistic framing device that simply falls flat of having the soldiers as old men in the supermarket coming across themselves as young men in combat gear and toting rifles (Kathryn Bigelow, where are you?!)

BUDDY (Casper Kelly, USA, 9, 4 stars)

Well THAT was a way to close what will probably be my last Sundance Film Festival. Not since the first time I saw “South Park” in the late 1990s have I seen a “kids show” so utterly demented and sociopathic and contemptuous of “kid shows” … IOW, such Victor Catnip. It’s a parody of Barney (“Buddy” is a pink unicorn) in which the all-loving TV host becomes a mass murderer, starting with a kid who just doesn’t want to play Buddy’s upbeat game but would rather read his book. IOW, such Victor Catnip. A couple of the kids just want to escape the show but realize once outside that they begin feeling hunger, needing to pee and having it land on Mr. Flower, and using the p-word for your little wee-wee. It played for a while like the anti-Pleasantville. It closes with an impalement and congratulations to the blood-splattered “bitch.” IOW, such Victor Catnip. Discussing it with bud Jeremy Matthews, who made everything possibly by letting me stay at his home in Salt Lake City, we alighted upon how hating Barney seems like a generational thing most acutely felt by Generation X and older millennials for whom the purple dinosaur / pink unicorn was everything our childhood culture was not — relentlessly positive, constant congratulation, directly speaking to the viewer, and not even an aspiration to adulthood. My favorites as a boy were Bugs Bunny and the other Looney Tunes characters; Scooby Doo and other Hanna-Barbera shows; and even live-action shows like Blue Peter and Magpie sometimes tried to make you a better person, they weren’t as aggressively and patronizingly childish as Barney/Buddy. And thus such a threat to their child viewers.