I finished my last Sundance movie at 2 a.m. Monday morning, and have spent much of this week slowly paying down my sleep deficit. But before the week is out I wanted to get down some of my thoughts about the festival as well as some of my favorite movies.
As I’ve written several times and said many more, I thought Sundance managed the pandemic-mandated shift to a virtual festival better than any other major institution—so much so that Tabitha Jackson, who ran the festival during those two years, would insist that people not use the word “virtual,” as if viewing at home and connecting online were just an imitation of the on-the-ground experience rather than an opportunity to create a much broader and more accessible one. The festival gave a little this year on last year’s requirement that any movie playing in Park City had to be available on the online platform as well, with the result being that online viewers only had access to about 80 percent of the lineup. But that was still more than any normal human could get through in a week, and the movies that were excluded—some of which are in my list of favorites below—are, I think without exception, all due for theatrical release this year, most in the next few months.
The online experience of 2020 and 2021 allowed me to get through more movies than ever before, mostly because the logistics of lugging a frail human body around a mountain town in freezing weather make binge-watching a stretch. (Three movies is a good day; five tests the limits of endurance. I’ve done six, but I don’t recommend it.) At home, it’s much easier to marathon, and more importantly, to take risks. There’s nothing worse than coming out of a screening only to find that the festival’s biggest sensation just bloomed into life on the other side of town, which pushes critics to opt for known quantities and follow the herd. Online, you can dip in and out at will, and bail as often as you want without having to squeeze past anyone’s knees.
Last year in particular, I discovered more riches in Sundance’s World Cinema programming, especially among the documentaries, than I’d ever known were there, and I tried to hold onto that knowledge even as I reluctantly slotted more obvious buzz magnets like the movie version of Cat Person into my schedule. (I’m only doing a rundown of favorites, but Cat Person isn’t on it, and we’ll talk about the reasons for that some other time.) Having access to the online platform, as I wrote last time, let me have the best of both worlds, and I looked forward to getting home and firing up my Apple TV almost as much as I did getting to Park City in the first place. I even had a bottle of High West left over from last year.
So, without further ado—and keeping in mind that, even on my couch, the laws of space-time still apply and there were at least half a dozen movies I wish I could have gotten to but ran out of time—here’s my best of Sundance, 2023.
1. Past Lives
I’ve written about Celine Song’s debut at length already, and expect to be writing about it again when it’s released by A24, presumably later this year. (No date has been announced.) For now, let’s just say that the story of a Korean immigrant (Greta Lee) who reconnects with her childhood love and ponders what might have been—and what might still be—knocked me out with its wistful melancholy, and it’s the reason I’ve already started making a Top Whatever List for 2023.
2. A Still Small Voice
Luke Lorentezen’s documentary doesn’t yet have an American distributor, which is the only reason it’s not sitting on that list alongside Past Lives. Focused on Mati, a chaplain-in-training at Manhattan’s Mt. Sinai Hospital, it’s a portrait of the people who help others navigate the cycle of grief, and the people those people turn to for help. The way Lorentzen makes this feel like both an intimate character piece and a Frederick Wiseman-style study of institutional imperatives feels almost like a magic trick, and I plan to keep watching the movie until I figure out how he did it.
3. Passages
The soft-spoken Ira Sachs seems like the world’s biggest nerd—at Passages’ world premiere, he recalled how during his first visit to Paris, he stayed for three months and saw 197 movies—but he makes movies like a freak, and I love it. This one stars Franz Rogowski as a movie director who’s married to Ben Whishaw but starts up a torrid relationship with Adèle Exarchopoulos, and reduces all three of their lives to utter chaos. Rogowski’s Tomas has the opaque élan of Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim, but the movie’s lengthy—and, can I just say it, hot—sex scenes make it clear why his lovers stick around even when he treats them like crap. The movie feels so much more grown-up than anything I’ve seen in ages, smart and sexy and a little bit messed-up. Which is to say, just about perfect.
4. The Tuba Thieves
“Land. Sundown. Dark woods. Trail. Far. Point to small, cute cabin; set there. Point to door. Open.” A little ways into Alison O’Daniel’s documentary, one of its subjects starts telling a story in sign language, and rather than translate it into the equivalent of smoothly spoken prose, the movie renders the text as a series of terse, disjunctive phrases—the point being, I think, to assert that sign is a language with its own rules, its own beauty, and not just an attempt to mimic hearing speech. It feels like the key to unlocking the movie’s structure, which weaves together news reports about a rash of band-instrument thefts, fictionalized (or maybe semi-fictionalized) character vignettes, and recreations of historical moments, like the last concert at San Francisco’s legendary Deaf Club, where roaring punk bands played to an audience that included the social club’s initially bewildered but eventually enthusiastic members, and the first performance of John Cage’s soundless 4’33”. Like Cage’s composition, the movie’s playful approach to sound and its expressive use of open captions has the power to transform the room it’s screened in, and although I watched it at home with headphones on, I’d love to see what it does to a live audience.
5. Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
This wasn’t quite the last Sundance movie I streamed, but I might choose to remember it that way, because Anna Hints’ urgent but contemplative documentary feels like the perfect note to go out on. Set almost entirely inside a cabin in the Estonian woods, the movie trains its lens on the bodies of women for whom the ancient ritual of a smoke sauna is both a release and an invitation to unburden themselves to one another. Hints doesn’t turn the women into characters, and sometimes doesn’t even us show us their faces as they recount stories of personal trauma and near-fatal illness, a gesture towards privacy that also tilts the movie towards the sacred.
6. You Hurt My Feelings
Last year’s deep dive on the films of ’90s indie icon Catherine Keener left me with a new apprection for her frequent collaborator Nicole Holofcener, whose keen depictions of urban hipsterdom now feel like precious jewels in a sea of CGI blockbusters and the genre-savvy debuts of filmmakers who can’t wait to be hired to make the next one. (To be fair, Holofcener has done a turn in the trenches herself, but at least she wrote the best scene in Black Widow.) The premise of her latest is an obvious slam-dunk: The marriage between Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ novelist and Tobias Menzies’ psychotherapist is put to the test when she overhears him admitting that he hates her latest book. But Holofcener deepens that irresistible opening into a sharply comic exploration of midlife uncertainty, where the drive for success slams into the suspicion that your best days are already behind you. It’s charming and painful and perceptive, and the whole cast, including Louis-Dreyfus, Menzies, Michaela Watkins, and Adrian Moayed, is a delight.
7. Fair Play
Chloe Domont’s sultry drama went to Netflix for $20 million, tied with John Carney’s Flora and Son as the festival’s biggest sale, and it’s not hard to see why. The movie stars Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich as a passionately in-love couple whose relationship is tested when she gets promoted above him at the hedge fund where they both work. It’s taut and sexy and gleefully nasty—you know Domont is one to watch in the first few minutes, when Ehrenreich goes down on Dynevor in the bathroom at an engagement part and comes up with a mouth smeared with menstrual blood—and would have been a massive hit in an era where movies like this actually got released in theaters.
8. The Eternal Memory
The new documentary from The Mole Agent’s Maite Alberdi is a straight-up heartbreaker, the story of a woman caring for her older husband as Alzheimer’s gradually wipes his mind away. The fact that Paulina Urrutia is an actress who was once Chile’s minister of culture and Augusto Góngora is a celebrated TV journalist who fought the historical erasures of the Pinochet dictatorship adds a layer of political resonance to the story, but the movie doesn’t let symbolism overwhelm the aching reality of their relationship, the tenderness with which she cares for him and the terror of wondering if he’s already remembered her for the last time.
9. The Starling Girl
A classic Sundance movie in the best sense, Laurel Parmet’s debut stars the excellent Eliza Scanlen (of Sharp Objects and Little Women fame) as Jem, a 17-year-old Kentuckian who finds herself straining against the boundaries of her rural Christian upbringing. What makes the movie special is that it doesn’t traffic in glib platitudes about breaking free of repression. The dialogue feels precise and well-informed, the kind you can tell is accurate even if you don’t know the community it depicts, and it treats its characters with respect even when they’re wrong. (Wrenn Schmidt is particularly excellent as Jem’s mother, whose rigid beliefs lead her to horrendous conclusions when she learns of her daughter’s transgressions.) You may figure out quickly where the plot is going, but it’ll get to you anyway.
10. Polite Society
After You Hurt My Feelings, my highest Sundance hopes were for the feature debut of Nida Manzoor, the creator of the deliriously great BBC series We Are Lady Parts. And, well, hopes were met. Priya Kansara stars as a British-Pakistani high schooler who’s horrified when her bohemian older sister (Ritu Arya) drops out of art school and into an arranged marriage with a wealthy pretty boy. She resolves to break them up, drawing on everything she’s learned as an aspiring stuntwoman and devotee of martial-arts movies, but it’s not quite clear how much is real and how much is teenage fantasy. (At one point, the sisters hash out their differences by throwing each other through walls while their parents sit calmly downstairs.) The movie is anarchic and hilarious, and even if it almost goes off the rails a time or two, it’s still a blast. A special bonus of hybrid Sundance: I got to watch Polite Society in Park City, go home, and watch it again with my Lady Parts-loving wife and daughter.
11. Talk to Me
(Update: almost forgot this one.) YouTubers Danny and Michael Philippou, better known as RackaRackaRacka, make their feature debut with this gleefully nasty movie about teenagers who mess with the occult and get more than they bargained for. Like Barbarian’s Zach Cregger, the Philippou brothers bring a comedic sensibility to horror, which isn’t just a matter of adding jokes but making you laugh at the their sheer audacity. Let’s just say that when a spirit warn’s one of the movie’s characters, “He’s gonna split ya,” it’s not speaking metaphorically. Like Past Lives, Talk to Me heads to Berlin, and it was picked up by A24, who should do extremely well selling it to fans of Bodies Bodies Bodies.
12. Bad Press
I’ll admit that, especially in the context of a film festival, a conventially made documentary can feel like a bit of a letdown. But not when it’s got a story as timely and involving as this one. Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler train their cameras on Mvskoke Media, a journalistic institution trying to speak truth to power in an arena where power holds all the cards. When the movie begins, only 5 out of nearly 600 American Indian tribes have any kind of institutionalized protection for freedom of the press, and when Mvskoke Media reports on the corruption within the government of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the few guarantees they have of being able to operate independently evaporate almost overnight. It would be wrong to cast this portrait of a vulnerable, resource-starved media outlet fighting for its right to exist as a harbinger when the crisis is already here.
13. Shortcomings
I’m a longtime fan of Adrian Tomine’s comics, so Randall Park’s adaptation of his 2007 graphic novel was instantly on my Sundance shortlist, and the movie doesn’t disappoint. It stars After Yang’s Justin H. Min as Ben, a once-aspiring filmmaker whose vicious sarcasm barely hides a deep vein of self-loathing. The movie opens with a hilariously pointed slap at the Crazy Rich Asians approach to representation, where characters become so aspirational they cease to be real, and then proceeds to demonstrate its opposite. Ben is just charming enough to not be entirely hateful—although the audience did vigorously applaud his moments of comeuppance—and Min is surrounded by a supporting cast, including a tart-tongued Sherry Cola as his queer best friend, Tavi Gevinson as a dopey performance artist, and a brief but knockout turn by Timothy Simons as a trendy fashion designer, that enlarges the movie’s canvas just enough so you don’t feel like you’re suffocating along with him.
14. Theater Camp
A mockumentary by Ben Platt and his theater-kid friends stood every chance of being insufferable, but—a Sundance miracle!—it’s warm and winning instead. Platt and co-director Molly Gordon star as instructors at Adirond Acts, an on-the-rocks institution for aspiring thespians and budding belters that is scrambling for purchase after its founder and leading light (a brief appearance by Amy Sedaris) suddenly lapses into a coma. With improvisatory input from a cast that includes Noah Galvin, Patti Harrison, Ayo Edebiri, and American Vandal’s Jimmy Tatro, the movie inevitably stands in the shadow of Christopher Guest, but for those who find Waiting for Guffman just a tad smirky about small-time performers, Theater Camp brings nothing but love.