"The quirky crime thriller Tuner follows Niki, a young piano tuner with acute absolute pitch, as he makes his rounds among an upscale New York clientele. At the film's outset, we meet his aging, hard-of-hearing mentor and wife (Dustin Hoffman, Tovah Feldshuh), ersatz parents who will soon recede into the background of this genre trope mashup. There are East European gangsters, Asian drug traffickers, safecracking, robbery, extortion, a killing, an encrypted wire transfer, a romcom meet-cute, even an onstage music competition."
"There's a theft of heirloom watches with a Holocaust motif. There are music bona fides too: the opening is cut to Herbie Hancock and the Headhunter's "Watermelon Man" (Hancock has a later cameo); another sequence is cut to Nina Simone's "Sinnerman"; names like Mussorgsky and Ravel are dropped in dialogue. Quite a lot to juggle, yet somehow director Daniel Roher succeeds in keeping all balls in the air while delivering a star-making turn for actor Leo Woodall as Niki."
"Films fortunate enough to be so honored by Sundance juries gain valuable visibility, boosting their chances at finding greater audiences. Several of the films mentioned in my first round of coverage won awards. However, many of the premieres at Sundance you will likely hear very little about. As director Eugene Hernandez commented at the awards ceremony, out of 16,000 submissions, 150 films were selected for this year's Sundance. How many festival attendees, no less reviewers, are able to see more than 20-30 of these?"
Sundance 2026 awarded a small number of films, giving those winners increased visibility and better chances of finding larger audiences. The festival screened about 150 films out of 16,000 submissions, leaving many premieres unlikely to receive broad attention. Daniel Roher's Tuner is a quirky crime thriller following Niki, a piano tuner with acute absolute pitch, navigating upscale New York clients, ersatz parents, gangsters, drug traffickers, theft, and music competitions. The film mixes musical references and genres while showcasing Leo Woodall in a star-making turn, and Roher is noted for his previous documentary success with Navalny.
Read at Filmmaker Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]