Best of Sundance 2023: top films from this year's festival
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(Clockwise from bottom:) Eileen, Sometimes I Think About Dying, Theater Camp, Past Lives, Little Richard: I Am Everything (Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival)
A special screening of CODA put a, well, coda to the end of a successful hybrid 2023 Sundance Film Festival this week, returning to in-person screenings in Park City, Utah, after two years of virtual programming. As with that eventual Oscar Best Picture winner, the illustrious indie fest this year produced plenty of features worthy of prizes, distribution, and critical acclaim. The A.V. Club writers, both on the ground bundled in coats and safely at home watching on laptops, had plenty of favorites. Read on for some of the best offerings at this year’s Sundance—a primer, perhaps, on next year’s awards season.
All Dirt Roads Taste Of Salt
Director: Raven Jackson
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Cast: Charleen McClure, Moses Ingram, Kaylee Nicole Johnson, Reginald Helms Jr., Sheila Atim, Chris Chalk, Jayah Henry, Zainab Jah
Two hands caressing each other. A long embrace between two people where we only see their arms and backs. A child’s hand on a fishing rod as her father instructs her, off camera, on how to catch fish. All Dirt Roads Taste Of Salt luxuriates in these montages. Slow as molasses and narratively opaque, it’s a movie that demands patience from the audience.
Writer and director Raven Jackson is also a poet and photographer, and you can see those influences here. Ostensibly a decades-spanning story of a woman from Mississippi, it unspools like visual poem vignettes that give us tiny glimpses into that life. Watching All Dirt Roads Taste Of Salt feels like watching an anthology of poems semi-connected in theme, come to gorgeous life on screen. Trying to discern a complete narrative is a futile undertaking; just relax and let it envelop you. Drawing inspiration from her own life and relatives, Jackson has created a unique cinematic experience that celebrates Black Southern life and traditions. [Murtada Elfadl]
Cassandro
Director: Roger Ross Williams
Cast: Gael García Bernal, Roberta Colindrez, Perla De La Rosa, Joaquín Cosío, Raúl Castillo
Mexican Lucha libre, with its flashy costumes and performative visions of masculinity, has long been ripe for the kind of tender queer storytelling behind Roger Ross Williams’ fiction feature debut, Cassandro. The film follows the eponymous luchador (played with wounded vulnerability and lithe physicality by Gael García Bernal), who daydreams about telenovelas and is wholly devoted to his mother, as he builds a career for himself as one of the most (in)famous “exoticos” to ever grace the Lucha libre stage.
In showing how Cassandro—born Saul Armendariz—turned his own effeminacy and penchant for the dramatic into assets amid an industry that expected their fighters to be villains and losers, the film treads familiar “sports drama” tropes (though, at least here, montages are set to the likes of Celia Cruz and Juan Gabriel). But the incandescent performances (joining García Bernal are the ever-reliable Roberta Colindrez and Raúl Castillo, as well as a luminous Perla De La Rosa), fabulous costumes, and riveting Lucha libre sequences, make for a thrilling film about learning to turn one’s truth to one’s glittering advantage. [Manuel Betancourt]
Eileen
Director: William Oldroyd
Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, Shea Whigham, Marin Ireland, Owen Teague
Eileen is a movie that will launch both endless debates and deep devotion. It’s bound to divide people, as evidenced by the stunned silence of its audience at the end of its Sundance premiere. Based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s acclaimed novel, the story starts quite conventionally. The eponymous character (Thomasin McKenzie), who works at a prison for adolescent boys in 1964 Massachusetts, becomes intrigued and consumed by a new counselor: Anne Hathaway, styled like Cate Blanchett in Carol, dripping with blonde perfection and glamour. No wonder Eileen looks at her like she’s craving candy. But there’s something sinister beyond this flawless surface.
Directed by Lady Macbeth helmer William Oldroyd and adapted by Moshfegh and Luke Goebel, Eileen is a stylish and wild ride that never lets up from its first frame to its shocking finale. Oldroyd keeps the tension alive, cinematographer Ari Wegner fills the frame with beauty and color, and McKenzie, Hathaway, and Marin Ireland (in a smaller role as the mother of one of Hathaway’s patients) scorch the screen with psychologically complex performances. Expect to be enthralled. [Murtada Elfadl]
Fair Play
Director: Chloe Domont
Cast: Phoebe Dynevor, Alden Ehrenreich, Rich Sommer, Sebastian De Souza
Chloe Domont makes a confident feature-length debut with Fair Play, a nerve-shredder of a romantic thriller that rests all its stakes on the intersection between love, ambition, and gender in the workplace. It cleverly introduces us to a newly engaged couple obsessed with each other, only to reveal what really gets them off: climbing the financial corporate ladder. They have one playful dynamic at home, and quite another in the toxic and overwhelmingly masculine workplace to which they dedicate most of their waking hours.
When a coveted promotion—all such promotions are coveted, with hawk-like intensity, at a firm like this—doesn’t go the way Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) expect, the psychological minefield Domont has meticulously created sets off explosive payoffs. She does tip the scales in favor of one half of this couple, and while one could pick apart the third act’s talking points—or rather yelling points—there’s no denying the satisfaction of a deliciously feminist vindication. Dynevor is a revelation as a shrewdly cutthroat yet utterly humane woman of ambition. But then again, it tracks that an actress ascending the industry of Hollywood would click with navigating the perils of a male-dominated, female-objectifying space where the stakes always seem at an all-time high. [Jack Smart]
Flora And Son
Director: John Carney
Cast: Eve Hewson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Orén Kinlan, Jack Reynor
John Carney’s latest ode to the power of music, Flora And Son, may be the most conventional film on offer at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and that is by no means a mark against it. Attendees trudging through snowy Park City from artsy drama to artsy drama surely appreciate its warm embrace, and the same will hold true for audiences elsewhere when it inevitably becomes an instantly beloved release. Starring an irresistibly charming Eve Hewson as a young Irish mother raising her delinquent son (Orén Kinlan) and discovering her innate musical instincts thanks to a virtual guitar tutor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), it’s the kind of film engineered to generate smiles from ear to ear.
There’s plenty of sour mixed in with the sweet, especially thanks to Hewson’s foul-mouthed intensity, and Carney and Gary Clark’s original songs are to die for. You know that thing where a musical film has to include a songwriting montage, and the grand reveal of that song has to serve as the entire story’s emotional climax? With Flora And Son, like Once before it, there’s no doubt that the resulting musical performance will deliver the feel-good goods, and have you applauding as the credits roll. [Jack Smart]
A Little Prayer
Directors: Angus MacLachlan
Cast: David Strathairn, Jane Levy, Celia Weston, Will Pullen, Anna Camp, Dascha Polanco
There is an unassuming gentleness to the way Angus MacLachlan’s A Little Prayer moves to introduce us to its characters. Slowly and with grace, MacLachlan introduces us to how Tammy (Jane Levy) and David (Will Pullen) are both at home and out of place as they share a household in Winston-Salem, North Carolina with David’s parents, Bill (David Strathairn) and Venida (Celia Weston). Their marriage seems to amble along with careless indifference, something neither seems all too eager to disturb. That is, until a visit from David’s wayward sister Patti and her daughter Hadley (Anna Camp and Billie Roy) threatens to derail whatever placid and pleasant life they’d all been leading.
As not-so-well-kept secrets spill out into the open and marital stressors make themselves known, MacLachlan’s quiet drama unravels toward a poignant (if aptly low-key) climax that reveals the filmmaker (of Junebug fame) as a keen observer of contemporary American life who can capture moments that feel small in stature yet immense in feeling. The payoff may take a while—this is a film for the patient—but its stellar central performances make its final moments well worth the wait. [Manuel Betancourt]
Little Richard: I Am Everything
Director: Lisa Cortés
Much like the performer himself, Little Richard: I Am Everything is a spirited, often grandiose examination of a genre-defining rock superstar who lived a tumultuous, multi-faceted life. Making clever use of sound design, editing, and stand-in performers, Lisa Cortés crafts a reverent portrait of the outspoken pioneer, acknowledging and respecting Richard’s frequent jumps between a rock-n-roll lifestyle and a zealous dedication towards religion and gospel. Beyond exploring the salacious ups and downs of his personal life, though, I Am Everything also dedicates much of its time to reclaiming the narrative of early rock-n-roll and highlighting the constant lack of recognition and appropriation by white artists that plagued Richard’s professional career.
Featuring interviews from former wives, music legends, and queer icons, the documentary is just as much a testament to Richard’s trailblazing attitude and persona as it is a chronicle of his life and career. Though at times the persistence of the astronomy-inspired metaphors and visual motifs feels a tad heavy-handed, I Am Everything is a much-needed and long overdue celebration and recognition of Little Richard’s undeniably instrumental influence in not just the early days of rock, but the music industry as we know it. [Lauren Coates]
Passages
Director: Ira Sachs
Cast: Franz Rogowski, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Ben Whishaw
Sundance mainstay writer-director Ira Sachs knows something fundamental about the connecting tissues of relationships both familial and romantic: they are messy and all the glories reside within the cracks of that disarray. In a fluid and casually immersive script co-penned by Mauricio Zacharias—usually a New York-based storyteller with the likes of Little Men and Love Is Strange—Sachs sets his Passages in Paris, the sensual city of romance, swoony architecture, and cigarettes. The story follows the often amusingly (and sometimes, insufferably) egotistical filmmaker Tomas (a sharp and hilarious Franz Rogowski), as he cheats on his level-headed husband Martin (Ben Whishaw, in a gracefully minor-key performance) and embarks on an affair with a woman. She is Agathe (an alluring Adèle Exarchopoulos), an independent personality who gets briefly entangled in their crossfire.
Through studious long takes, a textured look, and playful choreography, Sachs’ Passages examines the ever-evolving nature of sexuality and attraction with both intelligence and a sense of humor, knowing that the pursuit of a formulaic answer to the eternal mystery of love is only a fool’s errand and there’s no darker comedy than whatever happens around a dining table. Passages is both unapologetically sexy and infinitely wise in its refusal to succumb to the traditional norms of coupledom; what a novel and grown-up combination in cinema these days. [Tomris Laffly]
Past Lives
Director: Celine Song
Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro
When two childhood friends reunite as adults in A24’s Past Lives, there’s a lingering shot of the two of them staring and smiling, as if drinking each other in. Are they seeing a ghost or meeting a new person? Or some melancholy thing in between? Writer-director Celine Song’s camera drifts between them, in no rush to characterize or simplify this moment. You don’t have to have emigrated from Korea to New York for such a scene to resonate; Song, in transposing her real-life immigrant experience onto the screen, has made a film (her first!) that speaks to anyone who’s ever left home, caught up with an old lover, or contemplated the versions of themselves they’ve left behind in time or space.
Even as you don’t know where this story will lead, there’s a sense of the impossibility of these old friends having a romantic future, a refreshing certainty this story isn’t going in the direction of some torrid affair. With a performance that proves she should have been trusted with leading roles long before now, Greta Lee plays Nora, who reconnects with her schoolyard sweetheart from back in Seoul, Hae Sung (a mesmerizing Teo Yoo), first over Skype and years later in person in New York, where she lives with husband Arthur (John Magaro, compelling as ever). Cohering wonderfully with her actors, who remain utterly present and alive throughout Past Lives, Song evokes the dreamy specificities of reckoning with bygone eras to spellbinding effect. [Jack Smart]
Sometimes I Think About Dying
Director: Rachel Lambert
Cast: Daisy Ridley, Dave Merheje, Parvesh Cheena, Marcia Debonis, Meg Stalter, Brittany O’Grady
Fran (Daisy Ridley) is an Oregon office worker who exists in a cocoon separate from her coworkers and is prone to highly dissociative daydreams. When new hire Robert (Dave Merheje) seemingly plugs into her wavelength, it forces Fran into uncharted and highly uncomfortable territory. As scripted, Sometimes I Think About Dying is very much a movie of interpretation that feels purposefully vague. Working in conjunction with her below-the-line team, however, director Rachel Lambert (In The Radiant City) brings a unifying vision and tonal consistency to this intensely shoe-gazing arthouse bauble, even if its lineage (the film is adapted from a 2019 short film in turn based on a stage play) sometimes makes it feel like an unsuccessful exercise in elongation.
Audiences have seen many movies about social self-isolation told from a male point-of-view, and so a large part of what gives Sometimes I Think About Dying a sense of intrigue is its gendered perspective. Is Fran on the autism spectrum, a victim of trauma or abuse, some combination of the aforementioned, or none of the above? Ridley’s restrained, engaging, back-foot performance invites viewers to ponder this, and more. [Brent Simon]
The Starling Girl
Director: Laurel Parmet
Cast: Eliza Scanlen, Lewis Pullman, Jimmi Simpson, Wrenn Schmidt, Austin Abrams
The Sundance Film Festival has, over the last half-dozen years, often reserved a dramatic competition slot for at least one noodling examination of Appalachia or other rural environs. Most of these films, like 2019’s Them That Follow or 2020’s The Evening Hour, tend to disappear commercially without much of a trace. Coming-of-age drama The Starling Girl could reverse this trend, not the least of which because it doesn’t wildly over-dial the exoticness of its setting or present its fundamentalist characters as either two-dimensional villains or gaudy zoo inhabitants at which to gawk.
The Kentucky-set feature film debut of writer-director Laurel Parmet stars Eliza Scanlen as 17-year-old Jem Starling, whose truly outrageous sin (eclipsing even her affinity for carefully prescribed, church-sanctioned dancing) is not wanting to enter into an arranged courtship with Ben (Austin Abrams). Instead, Jem finds herself drawn to Ben’s recently returned older brother Owen (Lewis Pullman), who happens to be married. The paths traveled here are somewhat well-worn, but sketched with such tenderness and sincerity that it hardly matters. The Starling Girl also benefits from superb performances by Scanlen and Pullman, who each breathe rich life into their characters’ churning inner conflicts. [Brent Simon]
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
Director: Davis Guggenheim
What Gen-Xer didn’t have a youth partly defined by Michael J. Fox as a dreamy presence? In the joyous and appropriately emotional Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, deft documentarian Davis Guggenheim understands this nostalgia at a deep level and delivers the actor’s life story both inventively and with the utmost sensitivity. Guggenheim’s biggest success here is letting Fox be in charge of his own narrative by telling his story himself, a decision that smartly eliminates all potentially problematic avenues in engaging with the incurable Parkinson’s disease that the star lives with, after being diagnosed at age 29.
In that regard, Still is a work of empowerment and empathy, a celebration of Fox’s life as an actor and philanthropist who rose to fame through the sitcom Family Ties and the Back To The Future trilogy, after years of struggling in L.A., cooped up at a tiny apartment with no prospects. Alongside editor Michael Harte’s masterful work, Guggenheim pieces together the beloved actor’s tale, mostly using scenes from Fox’s own shows and movies. Also exquisite is the film’s romantic nature—indeed, Fox’s relationship with, and marriage to, his wife Tracy Pollan is a constant throughout Still. It’s beautiful stuff. [Tomris Laffly]
Theater Camp
Directors: Nick Lieberman and Molly Gordon
Cast: Molly Gordon, Ben Platt, Noah Galvin, Jimmy Tatro, Patti Harrison, Ayo Edibiri, Amy Sedaris, Caroline Aaron, Nathan Lee Graham, Owen Thiele, Alan Kim
The feature debut of co-directors Nick Lieberman and Molly Gordon, the loose-limbed, quite funny Theater Camp is one of the more winning efforts from Sundance this year. When the inspirational founder (Amy Sedaris) of AdirondACTS, a summer theater camp in upstate New York, is sidelined, her clueless son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) takes over, upending the lives of longtime instructors Rebecca-Diane and Amos (Gordon and Ben Platt, two of the film’s four writers). With potential foreclosure looming, the future of the camp seemingly hinges on the debut of their annual original musical.
Theater Camp isn’t as flat-out anarchic as Meatballs or as silly as Wet Hot American Summer, both obvious inspirations. Nor is it as rigidly framed as the work of Christopher Guest. (While there aren’t direct-address interviews, occasional interstitials frame the movie as a documentary.) No matter. Theater Camp has the type of loving skewering that can only come from smart, highly observant collaborators who know that one of life’s keys is to take work seriously without taking oneself seriously. It wrings smiles and laughs from immediately recognizable and relatable characters, riffing on everything from vocal warm-up exercises (“Wolf Blitzer has a blister on his upper lip”) to the notion of mentholated tear sticks being the equivalent of doping for actors. [Brent Simon]
You Hurt My Feelings
Director: Nicole Holofcener
Cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, Arian Moayed, Owen Teague
Writer-director Nicole Holofcener has a distinct sense of elegance on the page and behind the camera. Through her inquisitive characters of urban privilege, she makes one feel understood at a human level, articulating our secret thoughts with shrewd honesty in ways both enlightening and impossibly funny. Marking her reunion with Julia Louis-Dreyfus after her low-key rom-com masterpiece Enough Said, Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings is no exception.
Holofcener’s latest revolves around a semi-successful New York author (Dreyfus) struggling to garner interest for her next book. Supporting characters include a therapist husband (Tobias Menzies) with questionable finesse at his job, and the friends and relatives who surround the couple’s colorful world. Throughout, Holofcener offers sharp observations on marriage, professional success, and insecurities that sometimes become self-fulfilling prophecies, doing so with both an earnest (sometimes laugh out loud) sense of humor and a keenly observant eye. Anyone who’s ever told a white lie to lift up a loved one or maintained a seemingly innocent secret longer than necessary in the name of supportiveness will feel a little less alone in the world thanks to Holofcener’s deftness in articulating the quietest corners of the human spirit. [Tomris Laffly]
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