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Even as we look forward to next year’s edition in Boulder, Colo., the Sundance Film Festival put us in a reflective mood. It’s been years of cozy snowbound screenings, infuriating shuttle-bus delays and, more often than you’d expect, cinematic discoveries. In going over this year’s crop of standouts, we took turns casting back to our favorite memories of a festival now in transition.
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Amy Nicholson
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One corner of Sundance was just for the geeks: the Holiday Village Cinemas, a humble quadraplex that hosted press and industry screenings from breakfast till dark. No tickets, no celebrities, no fuss. Pure bliss.
When I first came to Park City, Utah, in 2010, I barely left the Holiday other than to sprint to the grocery store next door for beef jerky and sushi. (Judge me for eating raw fish in a landlocked state, but their nigiri was almost as good as H-Mart.) Then as now, I wanted to watch movies until my knees ached.
With a higher concentration of film critics per row than at any other theater, the Holiday was the best place to spot people I only knew by byline. Roger Ebert sat in front of me at “The Runaways.” He had already lost his lower jaw and wore his scarf tightly wound around his neck as though to prop up his smile. I was too shy to thank him for teaching me that a critic should meet a movie where it is — be that an art-house’s niche or a blockbuster’s four-quadrant appeal — and for writing “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” I’d trade my next 200 Sundance star sightings to have that moment back.
I wouldn’t recommend watching a comedy in a room full of critics. One of our weird quirks is we don’t always laugh as loudly as we would with a normal audience, lest we influence anyone else’s opinion about whether a movie is funny. Even so, the festival managed to launch “The Big Lebowski,” “Sorry to Bother You,” “Palm Springs,” “The Big Sick,” “House Party” and “Napoleon Dynamite.” One of my core Sundance memories is tumbling out of the Holiday with a half-dozen colleagues after the press screening of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s vampire mockumentary “What We Do in the Shadows” still howling about its sandwich punchline. We couldn’t wait to see it again with a rowdier crowd.
Last year, “The Ballad of Wallis Island” was my favorite film of the fest. If you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a treat. But it was bittersweet to watch it at the Holiday after learning that the theater itself had permanently closed in 2024. (Its Sundance usage was merely a temporary resurrection.) After the festival officially exits Utah, word is it’s getting demolished.
So I’m doubly glad that two of my favorite films at the last-ever proper Park City festival were comedies I saw at the Holiday. “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” is David Wain’s fifth Sundance premiere and his most rubber-mallet-to-the-head goofy since “Wet Hot American Summer.” A sex farce that’s “The Wizard of Oz” meets Terry Southern’s “Candy,” it stars Zoey Deutch as a Kansas kewpie who vows to sleep with Jon Hamm before her wedding. Deutch is as twinkly as ever, but the breakout is Ben Wang as an ambitious CAA receptionist, the brainy Scarecrow of the group.
Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite” is squirm comedy with grateful, air-gulping moments of release. Written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, it’s a four-person chamber piece about a miserable couple (Seth Rogan and Wilde) who host a dinner party for their new neighbors, played by Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz. Here’s an amuse-bouche: Rogan’s grouchy high school music teacher hates their wall-rattling sex. Confrontational and surprising, its the comic equivalent of not just airing a marriage’s dirty laundry in public, but broadcasting it on a Jumbotron.
As a bonus, keep your eyes peeled for Josef Kubota Wladyka’s “Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!” — a riot that trampled my resistance once I got past the corny title. Rinko Kikuchi is stupendous as a ballroom-dancing widow infatuated with her instructor. Tonally limber, this crowd-pleaser is made of slow-motion sequins and plenty of scenes of the increasingly off-balance Kikuchi tripping over her metaphorical feet. Get ready to rhumba. While I’m sad to say farewell to Park City, it’s time to stretch my own knees and go home.
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Mark Olsen
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This year’s Sundance felt marked by great uncertainty. Personally, I was never quite sure how to feel, as the many unknowns of next year’s move to Boulder meant that it was unclear how much this year was supposed to feel like the end of something or the start of a new beginning. I didn’t know just how mournful to be, though, as the festival marched along, it became clear there was a space for nostalgic reflections.
The first movie I ever saw at Sundance was Andrew Fleming’s comedy “Hamlet 2” in the Library Center Theatre. Which means it was 2008 and I was then an intrepid freelancer who talked my way into sleeping on a recliner at a condo rented by The Times until staffers trickled out and I eventually had the place to myself because of the vagaries of an extended rental agreement. Which is how I found myself, entirely unexpectedly, in a room interviewing all of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, who were in town for their tour documentary “CSNY/Déjà Vu.”
That sense of surprise and discovery — and in-person interactions that likely wouldn’t happen anywhere else — are what have brought me back to the festival every year I could manage since. It’s exactly why I have been a huge fan of the festival’s NEXT section, made up of films that don’t quite fit elsewhere in the program. A standout this year was Georgia Bernstein’s debut feature, “Night Nurse,” a film of assured poise about a young woman (a compelling Cemre Paskoy) who takes a job at a retirement home only to find herself drawn into a series of phone scams, erotic role play and psychosexual transference with one the clients. Recommending the film to colleagues feels a little like an HR violation, but the kinky undercurrents and unsettling emotions are worth it.
Many conversations around the festival seemed to firmly center on “The Invite” and “Josephine,” but another film people consistently brought up was “Wicker.” Written and directed by Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, adapting a short story by Ursula Wills-Jones, the film takes place in an unspecified time and place: a sort of medieval-ish middle European village of the mind, in which an unmarried woman (Olivia Colman) asks a local basket weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her a husband. That he comes out looking like Alexander Skarsgård sets the whole town into a tizzy. Nimble and inventive, with convincing special effects work, the film is a charming parable that continually finds ways to reset itself.
It is unclear just how planned it was, but there could have been no better film than “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” to be the final fiction feature to debut in the Eccles Theatre, one of the festival’s most storied venues. Character actor Noah Segan’s directorial debut, the movie is a warmly elegiac portrait of the city and the pain of recognizing when your time has passed. Led by a quietly commanding lead performance by John Turturro, the film also features Steve Buscemi and Giancarlo Esposito in supporting roles.
As the trio took the stage with Segan and other cast members after the film, it quickly became apparent how special it was to have those three actors there in that moment. Buscemi rattled off a quietly astounding number of films he has appeared in with “New York” in the title — “New York Stories,” “Slaves of New York,” “King of New York” — while Turturro spoke movingly about his relationship with Robert Redford, whose absence hung heavy over the entire festival.
As Esposito began talking about what Sundance has meant to him over the years, his words took on a fierce momentum. He recalled when he first came to the festival in the ’90s, he was “ecstatic because it gave a voice to those who didn’t have a voice. … We didn’t come to sell a film to a big studio. We came to share our small movie with human beings that could really see themselves in a mirror on the screen.”
Of Redford, he added, “His vision is priceless. It’s the gem that we all hope for. It’s the juice of why we live. It’s the connection of why this movie works. It’s the love of what we do. This, to me, will stick with me for the rest of my life. My interactions with this man who started this festival will always be a beacon of light in my creative process.”
It was a beautiful and inspiring way to leave that theater for the last time and, in turn, leave Park City behind for a future that, while full of unknowns, will for now also hold the promise of new discoveries to come.
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Joshua Rothkopf
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Park City has always been a place of good fortune for me, so in a karmic way that I can only partially explain, I’m sorry to say goodbye.
It’s where I landed an early freelance assignment in 2004, covering the Dramatic Competition for Dennis Lim, then the film editor of the Village Voice. It’s where I nailed a pivotal job interview, one that somehow ended with me falling head over heels into a condo’s indoor swimming pool while wearing my winter coat. (A story for another time.) And it’s where I returned in January 2020, freshly laid off but head held high, once again feeling the potential of new opportunities. Everything was about to change in a month or two, but Sundance helped.
Most of all, it’s where my eyes were opened to so many major horror movies, especially during a significant run of world premieres — unmatched by any other festival — that included “The Babadook” (2014), “The Witch” (2015), “Get Out” (a secret screening in 2017) and “Hereditary” (2018), that last being one of the few times in my career where I felt a generational talent emerging in front of a crowd: Ari Aster, riding the lightning of his Q&As and hanging on for dear life.
This year, running the panel for writer-director Adrian Chiarella’s haunting gay-conversion nightmare “Leviticus,” I felt that same thrill of witnessing an emerging horror voice. But the smart questions from the audience were what moved me most: young people self-identifying as queer, inspired by Chiarella’s example. There is always the possibility to get swept up in a film at Sundance, for it to become something you champion, for you to be changed in the process.
The idea of history being celebrated and preserved courses through “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” a conversational documentary belatedly assembled from a 1972 gathering of Harlem Renaissance giants at Duke Ellington’s apartment. But what makes the film truly energizing are its frequent glints of disagreement, flare-ups (never less than cordial) that truly capture what it means to love and engage with art. “Appreciation,” someone sternly defines as the job of criticism and you can tell his definition isn’t wholly shared.
We came to Park City to argue, to coalesce around favorites, to hate on the overrated. It was fitting that this year’s most mentioned title (also, more formally, the winner of the jury and audience prizes) was “Josephine,” a harrowing, difficult but essential movie about a young person who witnesses a rape. It’s a film that all but demands a conversation. Independently made, an actors’ showcase and undeniably outside the mainstream, “Josephine” could only have launched at Sundance. That annual feast seems movable — we’ll see you in Boulder.
The post We say goodbye to Park City with our 9 favorite movies and memories of Sundance appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
