If you’ve been following the coverage of this year’s all-digital Sundance film festival, there’s a very good chance that by the time you read this review, you’ll have already seen some version of the image above from Jane Schoenbrun’s
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.
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Whether this is by design is an interesting question to consider as you settle into the movie’s story about Casey (Anna Cobb), a teenage girl coming into different parts of herself that exist online and off. Though
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’s only promotional image seemingly says little about the horrors that come into Casey’s life, that specific shot of her staring into a webcam is one of the most striking, unnerving ways the movie urges you to see how everything unfolding on the screen is more relatable than it seems.
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Judas And The Black Messiah, Shaka King’s propulsive drama about Black Panthers chairman Fred Hampton and the months leading up to his murder by the FBI, “screened” last night at Sundance, providing a shorter, less glamorous, and largely online edition of the fest with its most prominent premiere. As Katie Rife’s full review is up on the site now and since I mostly concur with her thoughts I won’t expend many words on the late-breaking awards contender. That the film seems to eschew the kind of distortions and fabrications that mar the historically adjacent
Trial Of The Chicago 7 is mostly a strength, though there were times when I longed for a
Jane Schoenbrun‘s intimate narrative debut
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair opens with an eight minute unbroken shot that immediately pulls you in. Alone in her bedroom, a high school girl named Casey (
Anna Cobb, in her film debut) records a video of herself uttering the same phrase three times, pricking her finger with a pin, smearing blood across her computer screen, and pressing play on a video which bathes her in rapidly changing colors.
That’s the price of admission to enter a massive multiplayer online role playing game called The World’s Fair, which is described as “the Internet’s scariest online horror game” and said to incite physical transformations in those who play it. The rest of the movie (which is executive produced by
Sundance Review: We re All Going to the World s Fair Captures the Dread and Magic of a Life Lived Online Directed by Jane Schoenbrun
Starring Anna Cobb, Michael J. Rogers
Published Feb 02, 2021
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There was a brief moment, many years ago, when real life and the internet were separate entities, and the distinctions between IRL and URL were clear. Of course, as everyone can attest, the online sphere has quickly become our main living space as we spend every waking moment staring deep into our phones, computers and other devices. Films, then, have attempted to reflect this experience by demonstrating life online, but it s often incredibly hokey (the trashily fun
An online role-playing game sends a teenage girl on a path of self-exploration in writer-director Jane Schoenbrun's film 'We're All Going the the World's Fair.'