I closed out my trip to the Sundance Film Festival this year with a screening of Flora and Son, a charming new feature from Once’s John Carney. That sent me thinking back to my very first Sundance, the year that Once took the festival by storm. As a pre-existing fan of Glen Hansard’s band the Frames, I was one of scant few who went into the festival with any expectations for the movie at all, and it was astonishing to watch day after day as more and more people caught on and an unknown indie became a crowd-pleasing juggernaut. It’s the kind of phenomenon that Sundance is famous for, where you can practically feel a career taking shape in the room.
The more Sundances I’ve gone to—and it was a little alarming to do the math and realize that this year’s was my 17th—the more I’ve come to feel that the festival is all about “the room,” for good and sometimes for ill. It’s thrilling to be there the moment an exciting new voice enters the world for the first time, the kind of experience that you store away like water in a camel’s hump as you slog through day upon day of indifferent first features. But there’s also a particular kind of madness that can take hold, an altitude-inflected version of collective insanity that makes just-okay or worse movies the hottest ticket in town. I’ll never forget the year I knocked myself out scoring a ticket for Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, only to meet up with a couple of friends in the back of the theater and share our collective bafflement that this mawkish, twee, and lowkey racist movie had somehow become the talk of the festival. I was there when the audience gave a massive pre-premiere ovation to Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation, prompting a $17.5 million sale for a clumsy and artless piece of agitprop that was rightly trashed on its theatrical release.
Over the years I’ve come to believe that film festivals are as much about the movies you don’t see as the ones you do. At a massive festival like Toronto, you’re lucky if you can see 10 percent of the lineup—I got close to 25 percent one year, but only because I was on a jury—but it’s more than mere math. Most of the movies in a festival will find their way into the distribution ecosystem in one way or another, but for many, it’s the only time you’ll be able to see them in a packed theater with an attentive crowd, to be there before expectations have been set and the discourse has begun to ossify. No one will ever be as surprised by the greatness of Celine Song’s Past Lives as the 1,200 people at its Eccles premiere, before a promising-sounding debut by an Off-Broadway playwright became known as one of the best movies Sundance has shown in years. Imagine if that screening hadn’t fit into my schedule, or if I hadn’t seen Song’s play Endlings just before the pandemic prematurely shut down its run, and felt like that was reason enough to put it into my schedule.
Past Lives isn’t available through Sundance’s online incarnation this year, I suspect because its distributor A24 wants to prevent the hype from getting out of control and knew exactly how big a hit they have on their hands. But the vast majority of the festival, over 80 percent of it, is, which means that even though I’m home I’ll be spending the weekend rolling through movies on my Apple TV. Two years of online-only Sundances has underlined that it’s not the ideal way of experiencing a festival, even if it is the most efficient; I’ll never see as much of the Sundance lineup as I did last year, when I could plow through five or six movies in a day without needing to leave room for shuttle rides or the trek to the nearest restaurant (which in Park City is never that near), or even socializing with friends. But I’ve found that the physical details of an in-person screening are one of the things that help fix it in my memory, and prevent the entire festival from registering as one endless blur. (It’s been eight years since the screening of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl I mention above, but I can still remember that it took place at the Park City Library.) It turns out that for all their inconveniences, film festivals are actually a pretty good content delivery system.
Nonetheless, I loved that Sundance’s online-only years opened up the festival to people outside of the absurdly elite environs of Park City, where condos can easily go for $2,000 a night and even people with hard tickets can get shut out of buzzy screenings. And as glad was I was to be back in person—I even missed the low-alcohol beer and turkey chili—it changed things to know I could catch up with almost anything I missed once I got home. That’s what I’ll be spending the next few days doing, and I think it’s amazing that everyone else can, too.
Despite the fact that this is Sundance’s third year with a major online component, and that they’ve committed to streaming more thoroughly than any other major festival—for which I think Tabitha Jackson, who helmed the festival during its two pandemic years, deserves a ton of credit—I feel like the word still hasn’t gotten out about how easy it is to take part, and for less than the price of a regular old movie tickets. There’s really no better opportunity in the film-festival universe, and I wish more fests would follow Sundance’s transformative lead.
With that in mind, here’s a brief list of titles to check out in the next few days. (I’ll post a complete list of my festival favorites, including movies that aren’t available online, next week.) Access remains open until 2 a.m. Eastern Monday morning.
A Still Small Voice This documentary by Midnight Family’s Luke Lorentzen is one of the festival’s undisputed highlights. Set in a New York hospital during the early days of COVID, the film follows Mati, a nonsectarian chaplain-in-training, as she struggles to help others handle their grief while processing her own. It’s somehow both intimate and sweeping, intensely attuned to the toll that tending to people on their worst days can take on an individual, and the system that places that burden on their shoulders. Mati is a fascinating character, a descendant of Holocaust survivors who was raised ultra-Orthodox, yet whose own spiritual beliefs seem decidedly wifty and nonspecific (the movie’s title comes from her, but she’s talking about her own inner monologue, not the book of Kings). She can seem almost radiant in one moment and petulant in the next, but Lorentzen never forces us to pick a side.
Fair Play Some of this year’s biggest deals went to already established talent—like the $20 million Apple spent to acquire Flora and Son, Carney’s third Sundance movie—and many of the festival’s best movies came in with distributors already attached. That leaves Chloe Domont’s sultry drama as its biggest success story, a debut feature from an unknown director that went to Netflix for a whopping $20 million. 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. It’s the buzziest Sundance movie you can watch at home, and it’s a blast.
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.
Magazine Dreams Elijah Bynum’s second feature (after 2017’s Hot Summer Nights) is a bit of wreck, and there was speculation that the mixed Sundance reaction might prompt a much-needed recut. But it’s still a gripping watch, thanks almost entirely to Jonathan Majors’ incandescent performance as an amateur bodybuilder whose body dysmorphia and social awkwardness combine to toxic and terrifying effect. The movie drew unavoidable comparisons to Taxi Driver, but it’s a Taxi Driver where you’re frightened of what might happen to its central character, rather than just what he might do to others. Majors is magnetic and deeply vulnerable, and it’s great to see that, despite the fact that his movies this year include sequels to Ant-Man and Creed, he hasn’t been swallowed whole by the franchise machine, and even found something interesting to do with his Marvel bulk.
Shortcomings As a longtime fan of Adrian Tomine’s comics, 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.
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.
Beyond Utopia The phrase “documentary thriller” gets overused, but it definitely applies to Madeline Gavin’s portrait of North Korean defectors, and the awful consequences awaiting them should they fail. The movie includes an opening note that says it contains no re-enactments, and you may need to refer back to it given some of the astonishing footage its participants managed to capture.
Food and Country City of Gold’s Laura Gabbert returns to Sundance with a broadband exploration of what COVID has done to the food industry, particularly the small providers and boutique restaurants that were already at the edge of survival when the pandemic hit. Centered on the legendary food writer Ruth Reichl, the movie flits from family farmers to urban gardeners, high-end chefs to purveyors of comfort food, and explores whether COVID’s stress test might have broken just enough to allow the industry to rebuild itself in more humane and sustainable fashion. (Also, the food at the afterparty, from Los Angeles’ Porridge and Puffs, was amazing.)
To Live and Die and Live Like a few Sundance features I saw this year, Qasim Basir’s uses experimental aesthetics to take the curse of an overly familiar plot. In this case, at least, it works. It takes a while to put together that Amin Joseph is playing a filmmaker returning to his home in Detroit after the death of his stepfather, a hometown star who’s not nearly the success his family and friends think he is, especially when it comes to the money they’re all after him to provide—all well-worn Sundance tropes. But it’s gorgeous to look at, the kind of visually vivid movie where when I think back on it, I recall colors instead of scenes, and it grows stronger as it evolves into a parable about urban renewal and what serving your community really means.
Here’s what I’m hoping to check out in the next few days, knowing in advance this list is far too long to complete. Even at home, you can’t avoid missing something. 20 Days in Mariupol, 5 Seasons of Revolution, Against the Tide, Animalia, Bad Press, Birth/Rebirth, Divinity, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, The Eternal Memory, Fancy Dance, Fantastic Machine, Fremont, Heroic, Joonam, King Coal, Kim’s Video, Little Richard: I Am Everything, Mami Wata, Milisuthando, Pianoforte, Run Rabbit Run, The Tuba Thieves.
This week, not surprisingly, I wrote about Sundance. First, on Justice, the festival’s surprise Brett Kavanaugh documentary, which was announced on Thursday and screened to a sold-out house on Friday night, and whether it’s fair to ask a movie to accomplish what the entire Democratic party couldn’t. And on Past Lives, the most universally acclaimed Sundance debut in years. I don’t usually start making Top 10 lists this early, but I opened a fresh document just so I could put Past Lives in it. (If A Still Small Voice picks up a distributor, I’ll add that one, too.) I also made a guest appearance on the Film Comment podcast, along with Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson and Indie Memphis’ Kayla Myers, to talk about Sundance movies. (Because film festival schedules are so chaotic, we ended up recording in a hotel lobby at 11:30 at night, but hopefully you can’t tell from my punchdrunk voice.) Thanks again to the fresh-as-a-daisy Devika Girish for having me on.
Oh, and in non-Sundance news, I did my annual guide to the Oscar nominees you actually want to watch.
That’s it for this time. Happy Sundancing! And let me know if you see anything good.