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© 2026 The Couch Critic
Browse 29 movies from Sandbox Films
Facing the death of his country’s glaciers and the loss of his beloved grandparents, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turns his archives into a time capsule to hold what is slipping away — family, memory, time, and water.
May 2026
A doomed love triangle between intrepid French scientists Katia and Maurice Krafft, and their beloved volcanoes.
Jul 2022
As rhythmic machines press zinc sheets into coffins, factory workers reflect on their own mortality. Does daily contact with death heighten their awareness of life’s impermanence?
Sep 2025
This remarkable journey across our planet and universe explores how meteorites, shooting stars, and deep impacts have awoken our wonder about other realms—and make us rethink our destinies.
Sep 2020
Two biologists set out on an undertaking as colossal as their subjects—deciphering the complex communication of whales. Dr. Michelle Fournet and Dr. Ellen Garland journey to opposite hemispheres to uncover a culture eons older than our own.
Jun 2021
A cinematic voyage beneath the surface of the earth.
Mar 2026
André, a brilliant idiot, is dying because he didn’t get a colonoscopy. His sobering diagnosis, complete irreverence, and insatiable curiosity, send him on an unexpected journey learning how to die happily and ridiculously without losing his sense of humor.
Feb 2026
An environmental nuclear crisis threatens Utah. Two scientists and a politician urgently work to prevent an unprecedented catastrophe in their home state.
Jan 2026
A psychedelic odyssey into the fabric of the universe, guided by a filmmaker’s immersive practical experiments that transcend into a deeply hypnotic audio-visual experience of awe and human connection to the natural world.
In India and the U.S., scientists are developing a new male contraceptive that could revolutionize family planning and transform women’s lives worldwide. The film follows the researchers as they strive to successfully launch a reversible male contraceptive—the first breakthrough since the modern condom was invented 200 years ago.
In Silico explores an audacious 10-year quest to simulate the entire human brain on supercomputers.
Nov 2020
Black holes stand at the limit of what we can know. To explore that edge of knowledge, the Event Horizon Telescope links observatories across the world to simulate an earth-sized instrument. With this tool the team pursues the first-ever picture of a black hole, resulting in an image seen by billions of people in April 2019. Meanwhile, Hawking and his team attack the black hole paradox at the heart of theoretical physics—Do predictive laws still function, even in these massive distortions of space and time? Weaving them together is a third strand, philosophical and exploratory using expressive animation. “Edge” is about practicing science at the highest level, a film where observation, theory, and philosophy combine to grasp these most mysterious objects.
Mar 2020
Deep in Mexico’s mushroom-rich forests, two women from indigenous communities have become mycologists. This immersive sci-fi documentary follows their unusual, fungi-driven paths as they seek to reconcile the past and present while reimagining the future for themselves and the changing world they inhabit.
In the dense forests of the Eastern Himalayas, moths are whispering something to us. In the dark of night, two curious observers shine a light on this secret universe.
Jul 2024
Two workmen and an apprentice drive through the city at night, replacing old sodium street lights with LED. Beneath their glow, the city grapples with change, as progress marches on.
Apr 2025
A meditative, observational portrait of Hansen Dam Aquatic center – a public park with its own swimming pool.
Mar 2025
The biggest tech revolution of the 21st century isn’t digital, it’s biological. A breakthrough called CRISPR gives us unprecedented control over the basic building blocks of life. It opens the door to curing disease, reshaping the biosphere, and designing our own children. This documentary is a provocative exploration of CRISPR’s far-reaching implications, through the eyes of the scientists who discovered it, the families it’s affecting, and the genetic engineers who are testing its limits.
Mar 2019
Takes the music from the studio to the screen with gorgeous visuals and a sense of heightened reality envisioned by Musgraves and Zeinali and shot by Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Matthew Libatique.
Sep 2021
On February 2, 2023, Flaco — a male Eurasian eagle-owl, the largest species of owl in the world — was discovered missing from his cage at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan. What follows when Flaco, who had lived his entire life in captivity, was released in New York City is a surprising story revealing the delight, concern, and fascination of millions in the city and beyond.
Jul 2026
In conversation with his young son, a filmmaker wonders about time — our attempts to control it, and how it controls us. Intimate and political, poetic and scientific, the film explores the tension between objective and subjective time: from physicists tending atomic clocks, to people's daily encounters with the temporal, to the instrumentalization of time for power and commerce.