PARK CITY, Utah — “Where’s the snow?” my rideshare driver wondered with a groan as we left Park City. Usually at Sundance, the weather is a menace. But the lack of it was more concerning. Between films, there were three main topics of conversation: What’s good? What’s the latest newspaper headline? And what’s going to happen to this tourist town next week after the festival leaves during the worst snow drought in a century to date?
No one knows the answer to that last question, although nearly every local brought it up and seemed a little tense. We stayed at the same rental as last year and this time they were extra solicitous, gifting us not one but two packages of frozen croissants from the Utah tradwife influencer Ballerina Farm. I baked a dozen. They got rave reviews.
The other key question is what’s going to happen to the Sundance Film Festival once it relocates to Boulder in 2027. Will the vibes dissolve in a larger city just as the only dusting of snow all week vanished when it touched the sidewalk? And what will happen to the independent film industry if its cornerstone festival loses its footing?
I’m optimistic. The indie films I saw this year were, on average, better than the year before — and last year’s were better than the year before that. Best of all, when I go out to the movies here in L.A., it feels like I’m seeing a surge of young people who want to experience something unique. I’m convinced that a new movement is coming.
Yes, it’s not unreasonable to fret about the influencer content dominating smartphones, but the flip side is that exponentially more people know how to measure in real time what’s connecting with an audience. A fraction of them will challenge themselves to make a real movie. A fraction of those will be good. It only takes a few talents to spark a generational wave.
This year’s Sundance has yet to anoint those directors (though I’m keeping tabs on Aidan Zamiri of “The Moment”). It will. The big hope about the leap to Boulder is that college students will outnumber wealthy ski bunnies. While that crowd won’t have the cash for the top-tier $6,900 badge, Sundance already offers cheaper passes for cineastes between 18 and 25. That’s rich soil for the future. I can’t wait to see what movies they love. That Utah rideshare driver, however, was justifiable more grouchy. “You will be sleeping in dorms,” he warned. “Steakhouses? You will be eating sandwiches at 7-Eleven!”
Planes continually rumble overhead in Walter Thompson-Hernández’s “If I Go Will They Miss Me,” shot on location at Nickerson Gardens in Watts under the flight path to LAX. The main story is about a boy (Bodhi Dell) who hero-worships his self-destructive father (J. Alphonse Nicholson). Meanwhile, his mother (Danielle Brooks) wonders when she’ll decide she’s had enough. The Greek mythology metaphors are a bit over the top (the kid likens his dad to both Pegasus and Poseidon) but if you listen closely, you’ll hear a humming background story about a gush of jet fuel dumped on top of a low-income school. Michael Fernandez’s artful and intrepid cinematography was the best I saw all fest.
As I write this, I hear there’s a bidding tussle for “Wicker,” Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s satirical marriage fable about a spinster fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) who is so tired of being the village outcast that she commissions a basket weaver (Peter Dinklage) to build her a husband (Alexander Skarsgård). This funny, filthy takedown of chauvinism is steeped in retrograde thinking and traditions. Characters have niches, not names: A bored mother (Elizabeth Debicki) brags that she used to be known as the Doctor’s Daughter and now she’s the Tailor’s Wife. Her jealousy is delicious when Skarsgård’s strapping wooden groom makes the other men look small, telling Colman that she’s “the reason I live and breathe.”
Speaking of satisfying defeats, I dipped out between films to see the Hungarian grandmaster Judit Polgár challenge Alec Baldwin to a game of chess. To even the battlefield, Polgár agreed to play blindfolded while the co-founder of Chess.com narrated Baldwin’s moves. As a Chess.com obsessive (please don’t look up my godawful rating), I’d contentedly nerded out watching Rory Kennedy’s punky documentary “Queen of Chess,” which Netflix debuted at Sundance before its streaming release on Feb. 6. Layering a retro pop soundtrack over an impressive barrage of ’80s and ’90s archival footage, it celebrates Polgár’s climb from 5-year-old prodigy to teenage ego-destroyer, as well as her multiple attempts to defeat world champion Garry Kasparov. I had to see her genius in person.
“If I win, I get to buy Warner Bros.,” Baldwin wisecracked, fully aware that he was about to be slaughtered. But a couple of his moves surprised her. He may have been the first opponent Polgár has played since childhood who had no idea what he was doing. Ignorance made him unpredictable. Baldwin was so hapless that he didn’t even know when he was near death. He may not have been the worst player in the room, but most everyone chuckled when the announcer attempted to reassure him that he was “actually doing great.” She crushed him in 14 turns.
The Sundance grand jury competition winners have yet to be announced but I’ll buy Warner Bros. if the family drama “Josephine” doesn’t get an award. The second film by the perceptive and steely filmmaker Beth de Araújo (her first was 2022’s “Soft & Quiet”), it observes the home fallout after an 8-year-old girl (Mason Reeves) witnesses a rape. Josephine’s mother (Gemma Chan) wants the child to see a psychiatrist but her jock dad (Channing Tatum) would rather stick her in self-defense training. De Araújo lived through a similar trauma and skillfully maps the chasm between parents who want to protect their kid’s innocence and a girl who needs answers.
All week I’d agonized about what movie would be my emotionally laden farewell salute. When the time came, it was the “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York,”starring John Turturroas a sleight-of-hand artist struggling to stay solvent when fewer marks carry cash. “Pickpocket” also happened to be the last narrative feature to premiere at the Eccles Theater. It felt right to close out the festival with a film about nostalgia and change, the kind of instantly classic, well-crafted indie that could have played at any decade in the fest’s history.
Written and directed by Noah Segan, an actor-turned-filmmaker who first came to Park City in 2005 as the snotty punk in Rian Johnson’s teen noir “Brick,” Pickpocket” carries itself with a confident, old-school charm — much like Turturro himself — and afterward the 1,200-seat room gave the actor a standing ovation. Steve Buscemi and Giancarlo Esposito have supporting turns as, respectively, a pawn shop owner and a cop, and joined Turturro onstage where the super-group of Sundance veterans spoke of their personal affection for Robert Redford. At a panel earlier that day, Turturro even joked about how good Redford smelled.
The film’s vintage patina doesn’t detract from rising actor Will Price’s confident performance as an immature mobster who prefers bitcoin to stacks of Benjamins. Price represents the societal upheaval that Turturro’s character rejects and it’s not too much of a stretch to say he’s the kind of callow 20-something who would rather watch AI slop than “Josephine.” I hope Sundance doesn’t get dragged down by guys like him in Boulder. But I hope Price himself is there with another great role — and another, until he’s a Sundance veteran too.
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